Lydia Gates and the Templar Treasure
by rjwritergirl
Summary: What if Ben had a daughter that accompanied him on the Quest to find the Templar treasure? Lydia Emmaline Gates comes along with her father while he searches for the Templar Treasure. Rated T to be safe. Final chapter is up! I'll post a note when the sequal is posted!
1. Chapter 1

**Hey! This is my first story in the National Treasure fanfiction world, I usually dabble in Harry Potter or Dukes of Hazzard but I thought to myself, "Self why not get into National Treasure fanfiction? after all, National Treasure is your favorite movie." and then I realized that was a great idea, so I started watching the first movie to try and get a storyline and I came up with the idea that Ben had a daughter that went with him, Riley and Abigail to find the Templar treasure. Thus was born Lydia Emmaline Gates, and Lydia Gates and the Templar Treasure. The story starts out when the movie does, when the group is looking for the Charlotte.**

"Hey, does this one turn the windshield wiper on?" Lydia asked, pointing to one of the buttons by the steering wheel.

"Lydia Emmaline Gates!" Ben Gates reached out and grabbed his daughter's hand, stopping her hand several inches from the button she had been pointing to.

"Awww Dad." Lydia moaned, "I was just joking around. Ian knew I wasn't going to poke any buttons," Lydia paused and turned to Ian, "Right?"

"Right," Ian said, trying to smile at the girl.

"If I had something else to think about I wouldn't bother Ian so much." The sixteen-year-old insisted, then shrugged. "I don't have anything to distract me, I lost my book at the airport, remember?"

"Why don't you think about Henson and Peary, crossing this kind of terrain with nothing more than dog sleds and on foot, can you imagine?" Ben said, turning to look at his daughter.

"That's great, Dad." Lydia yawned, still bored.

"You knew that most of this would be boring." Ben countered his daughter's next sentence.

"And you know how much attention I'd get from Nana during mid-terms Dad. Try zero attention. And you know that Grandpa and I don't get along that well." Lydia pre-empted her dad's next statement; they'd had this argument several times already.

"I offered to arrange for you to stay with Stacy and her family."

"Stacy and her family can go bite a pretzel." Lydia huffed, "She's not my friend anymore."

Ben sighed heavily. "How is it that you go through about four sets of friends in less than a year?"

"Because most kids are only curious about getting to know the chick with the whacko theory about the founding fathers," Lydia sighed, sounding exactly like her father. "If I was allowed to take that test to skip…"

"I don't want you skipping grades." Ben interjected.

"Just one grade?" Lydia begged.

"You've already skipped a grade." Ben said.

"I skipped kindergarten, that's not a grade." Lydia shot back, leaning back in her seat.

"Are we getting closer?" Ian's voice suddenly cut into the argument, effectively silencing both Gates family members.

Riley, who was sitting next to Lydia, spoke up. "Assuming Ben's theory is correct and my tracking model's accurate, we should be getting very close. But don't go by me -I broke a shoelace this morning." Both Lydia and Ben turned to look at him, eyebrows raised. "It's... it's a bad omen." He explained, as though everyone should've been aware of the fact.

_How can breaking a shoelace possibly jinx an already dangerous excursion into the arctic?_ Ian asked himself. "Shall we turn around and go home then?" He asked, smiling a little.

"I say we just dump out him out here let him find his own way**,**" Lydia said, "I can do his job." She grinned and teasingly reached for Riley's computer.

"Yeah, OK. Not funny." Riley said, inching as far away from Lydia as he could in the small space.

"Riley, you're not missing that little windowless cubicle we found you in**,** are you?" Ben looked over his shoulder at the younger man.

"No, no. Absolutely not," Riley said, shaking his head and smiling. "You have no idea how much I love doing this." Silence reigned in the snowmobile for a moment while Lydia looked out at the seemingly never-ending landscape of snow.

"Riley, how much do you want to bet that we find the ship today, but it's so dark by the time we find it that we can't dig it out?" Lydia asked.

Ian and Ben groaned silently; they hated this game. It was a joke between the two youngest members of the expedition. Typically, Lydia would ask how much Riley wanted to bet that something unlikely would happen, and he would respond by asking how much she wanted to bet that something even less likely was going to happen. The game continued and the suggestions grew more ridiculous, until neither of them could think of any other unlikely scenarios.

"How much do you want to bet that we find it today, but it's so dark that we can't dig it out, but then we wait for three hours and suddenly it's light again?" Riley asked, referencing how much sunlight this part of the arctic got.

"How much do you want to bet…?" Lydia started to ask, but Riley's computer began beeping. Lydia paused, leaning over to look at the screen.

"We're here." Riley announced. "I win this round," he said to Lydia with a childish smile.

"You won't win the next round." Lydia shot back as she opened her door and jumped out.

"I don't see anything**,** Dad," she said, pulling a knit cap over her brown hair and pulling her hood up over it to keep the wind out of her face.

"I thought we were looking for a ship." Shaw, who had gotten out of the other snowmobile, spoke up, looking around confused.

"Spread out, look with the metal detectors, call out if you find anything." Ben instructed as he opened the storage unit on the snowmobile. He grabbed a detector and turned it on.

"Why are we stopping?" Shaw asked Riley again."I thought we were looking for a ship, this is a waste of time." He sighed. "How could a ship wind up way out here?"

"Well, I'm no expert, but..." Riley turned to the man, unaware that Lydia was listening in. "It could be that the hydrothermic properties of this region produce hurricane-force ice storms that cause the ocean to freeze and then melt and then refreeze, resulting in a semi-solid migrating land mass that would land a ship right around here."

Lydia turned her metal detector on and started sweeping it across the snow. Twenty minutes later, she was bored out of her mind. Yes, she'd known this part would be boring; she simply hadn't realized _how_ boring it would be.

"Lydia, I don't want you to go off all alone." Ben called to his daughter after seeing how far away she was. "Stick with Riley or me."

Lydia sighed, _i__t's not like I've strayed far enough to get lost out here_; she thought _Dad's can be so over protective._ "Riley, can I stick with you?" She asked, turning to the man.

"Sure." Riley said, just then figuring out how to turn his metal detector on.

"I'll search with Riley, Dad." Lydia called back.

"Okay." Ben moved farther away from his daughter and closer to Ian.

Lydia blew out a breath, as she swept the metal detector in a semi circle.

"How much do you want to bet one of Ian's goonies finds something but doesn't tell us?" Lydia asked.

Riley smiled. "How much do you want to bet that they tell Ian and not Ben?" he shot back.

Four 'how much do you want to bet's' later, Ian's friends were finding the treasure, telling Ian but not Ben, and were selling the treasure off a little at a time to passing Eskimos who were feeding Ben, Lydia and Riley while they still looked for the 'unfound' treasure.

"How much do you want to bet…" Riley started, but he stopped talking when Lydia's metal detector started beeping. She slowed her sweep, and it stopped.

"Here," Riley took a few steps in Lydia's direction and swept his detector over the same area. His detector beeped as well. Riley and Lydia grinned at each other.

"I think we found something!" Riley called to Ben and Ian. Both men hurried over. Ian handed Riley an ice pick, and Lydia reached for the pick her dad was holding, but Ben held it out of his daughter's reach, shaking his head.

Lydia knelt next to Riley, shivering as the cold seeped through her layers of clothing. Once the man had gotten some ice chunks loose, she got them out of the way to help Riley see where he was digging.

Soon there was the crunch of metal digging through wood. "I broke it!" Riley's eyes widened in horror and his mouth dropped open.

"With therapy, I think we'll come to forgive you someday." Ben deadpanned, getting snow out of the way so he could see what it was that Riley had hit.

"It looks like timber; it could be any part of the ship." Ian commented.

"Let's go get one of the snowmobiles out and dig right here." Ben suggested. "If we're careful we won't damage the ship."

Four hours later, parts of the ship were dug out of snow and the men were getting ready to go in and explore.

"Lydia, you don't have to come in here if you don't want to." Ben told his daughter.

"Would I have begged and pleaded with you to let me come if I wasn't going to do it all?" Lydia asked as she took her hat off for a moment to tie her hair up in a casual pony tail. She quickly put her hat back on and rubbed her hands over her ears, "I'll have to go get my ear muffs from the mobile though."

"Go get them, quick." Ben said.

"Ian." Lydia trekked across the snow to the blonde man, "I need the keys to the snowmobile, I left my ear muffs in there." There was a locked trunk in the snowmobile that they had used for extra supplies, including extra gloves and scarves. Lydia hadn't like wearing her ear muffs in the snowmobile so she'd dropped them in as they were getting ready earlier that morning.

Ian handed the keys to Lydia and turned back to the men in the group**.** "Let's go get some treasure," He called to the group that was slowly walking down a staircase leading into the ship.

"Wait for me!" Lydia ran to the mobile and opened the door to it. She quickly unlocked the box her ear muffs had been locked in, grabbed them and jammed them on her head. She stuffed the keys into her jacket pocket and ran after her Dad, Ian and Riley. Just as she got there, her dad abruptly stopped talking to Riley, who was agreeing to something Ben had been saying.

"How long do you think it'll take to search the ship?" Lydia asked as she stepped into the ship.

"An hour, what about you?" Riley asked, he was walking ahead of her, but he turned around partway to see her.

"More than that," Lydia said. "Since we don't know how big this ship is and since we're all together...." She trailed off as an idea came to mind.

"Hey; if we split up, do you think we'd find the treasure faster?" Riley asked the group as a whole.

"It's possible." Ben said, "You know what we're looking for, right Lydia?"

"Yeah," Lydia shrugged. She knew what to look for as much as any of them did.

"Stay with Riley," Ben ordered his daughter, "We're looking for a cargo hold." He addressed Ian, Shaw and Powell now. "It's a good bet that the Captain knew what he was carrying when he set sail, so he wouldn't have kept it out, he would have hidden it,"

"If the captain was trying to keep it hidden shouldn't we be looking for a smuggler's hold?" Ian asked.

"He probably wouldn't have carried the treasure with him." Ben said shaking his head, "Plus if it was in the smuggler's hold there was a greater chance of it being stolen; ships from this era would have smuggled people over as well as illegal cargo."

Ian's facial expression changed, but Lydia couldn't tell what he was thinking.

"So, why don't we have Riley and Lydia pair off?" Ben said, pointing to his daughter and Riley. "Then the four of us can figure out who goes with whom," he turned to the other three men in the ship.

"While you boys are trying to figure out who goes with whom, I'm going to go searching for the treasure." Lydia said. She turned and motioned for Riley to follow her.

"How much do you want to bet that we find the treasure before them?" she asked once the two of them was in another room,

"How much do you want to bet that Ian tries to get the credit for the entire treasure himself?" Riley retorted.

"How much do you want to bet that...." Lydia couldn't think of an unlikely thing to happen.

"I win!" Riley teased, grinning as he pumped his fist in the air.

"Let's just go look for a cargo hold." Lydia suggested. She and Riley walked down a passageway and found themselves in the ship's sleeping quarters. There were doors to their right, and at each one, Riley and Lydia opened it, hoping it would lead to a cargo hold.

"Wow." Riley said they'd opened the last door in the passageway; Lydia peeked in.

"Ditto," she agreed. They were looking at the captain's quarters, and even underneath the snow they could tell that it had once been very nice. Lydia started to go into the room, but murmured voices halted her

"I found something!"

Lydia's eyes lit up as she recognized her dad's voice.

"It's Dad."

There was the murmur of voices and Lydia could hear snatches of words. "Meerschaum....pipe." Then Ben's voice said "...we...closer...sure, gentlemen."

Lydia and Riley both grinned; Lydia turned trying to make her way down the hall to find a way to her dad. The passageway turned here, maybe there was a door in the bulkhead....

"Ben, I thought you said that the treasure would be on the Charlotte." Ian's voice carried through the bulkhead.

Lydia rolled her eyes; she should have known that Ian would be greedy about the treasure.

Ben replied with something that neither Lydia nor Riley could hear. They could only make out the last part, "...could be here."

There was silence as Riley and Lydia kept walking down the passageway, trying to find a door to Ben and the rest of the group.

Suddenly Ben's voice started talking again. "The legend writ." It sounded like he was reading something. "The stain affected, the key in Silence undetected. Fifty-five in iron pen, Mr. Matlack can't offend."

Lydia and Riley could see that the hallway was ending, but it appeared to stop at a wall. As Lydia got close to the end and shined her flashlight on it, she finally saw that it was a door. She reached out and ran her hands over it, trying to figure out how to open it as there was no handle, as she looked at it, the conversation kept going. Ben was quoting some of the poem he'd read from and thinking out loud as he walked around. Lydia couldn't hear everything but his voice was becoming clearer.

"It's a riddle. I need to think.... What legend? There's the legend of the Templar treasure... affects the legend. How? 'The key in Silence undetected.' Wait." There was silence and Lydia paused, trying to hear what her dad was saying.

"The legend and the key... Now there's something. A map. Maps have legends, maps have keys. It's a map, an invisible map. So now..." Lydia had finally figured out how to open the door. She motioned to Riley that she had figured it out as Ian spoke from the other side of the door.

"Wait a minute. What do you mean, 'invisible' - an invisible map?"

Riley quickly shook his head at Lydia, motioning her not to open it.

"Why!?" Lydia whispered, confused.

"Ian doesn't seem happy, I don't trust him." Riley hissed, "Trust me, and keep quiet."

Lydia nodded slowly, Riley may be a little naive, but he was responsible and she trusted him.

"'The stain affected' could refer to a dye or a re-agent used to bring about a certain result." Ben said, going over the poem in his mind. "Combined with 'The key in Silence undetected', the implication is that the effect is to make what was undetectable, detectable. Unless... 'The key in Silence' could be..."

"Prison," Lydia couldn't tell if it was Shaw or Powell who had spoken, but it seemed so random that she giggled.

"Albuquerque. See, I can do it too." Riley whispered in Lydia's ear and she fought back a snort; Riley could be so funny sometimes. "Snorkel."

"That's where the map is, like he said, 'Fifty-five in iron pen.' Iron pen is a prison."

"Or it could be, since the primary writing medium of the time was iron gall ink...." Ben trailed off, obviously at a loss for words, "The 'pen' is... just a pen." He paused again, but continued, sounding confused. "But then why not say a pen? Why... why say 'iron pen'?"

There was the low rumble of a single voice; probably Shaw or Powell saying they still thought it was a prison.

"Wait a minute." Ben spoke again. Lydia smiled; she could tell from her father's voice that he had figured out what the iron pen was.

"'Iron pen' - the iron does not describe the ink in the pen," He was getting excited now, Lydia could tell. "It describes _what_ was penned. It was iron - it was firm, it was mineral... No, no, no, that's stupid. It was... It was firm, it was adamant, it was resolved."

Ben's voice grew quieter and both Riley and Lydia pressed their ears against the door, trying to hear what Ben was saying.

"It was resolved." Ben quoted the last line of the clue "'Mr. Matlack can't offend.' Timothy Matlack was the official scribe of the Continental Congress. Calligrapher, not writer, and to make sure he could not offend the map, it was put on the back of a resolution that he transcribed, a resolution that fifty-five men signed." Ben paused for a moment; both he and Lydia spoke at once. Ben's words were directedto Ian, Shaw and Powell, and Lydia's to Riley, in a whisper.

"The Declaration of Independence."

* * *

_Please Review_


	2. Chapter 2

**Thank you to the reviewers, I love any and all reviews!**

**Here's chapter two, enjoy!**

Riley was looking at Lydia in disbelief, shaking his head firmly.

"No way," he mouthed.

"That's clever, really." Ian's voice came through the wood; clearly he believed Ben. "A document of that importance would ensure the map's survival."

Lydia nodded, silently agreeing with Ian.

"And you said there were several Masons that signed it?" Ian didn't sound sure of himself, as he checked his facts with Ben.

"Yeah. Nine, for sure." Ben's voice was still quiet.

"We'll have to arrange a way to examine it."

Lydia scoffed and looked at the wall, as if it personally given Ian the idea.

"This is one of the most important documents in history. They're not just going to let us waltz in there and run chemical tests on it." Ben said determinedly. Lydia nodded in agreement.

"Then what do you propose we do?" Ian asked.

"I don't know!" Ben's sharp voice came through the wood loud and clear.

There was the low rumble of a voice, Ian's probably.

"Steal it?" Ben's voice sounded tired. "I don't think so."

"Good for you, Dad." Lydia whispered.

"Ben..." Ian sounded like he was trying to convince Ben, had Lydia been in the room with him she would have told him to save his breath. As much as Ben Gates wanted the treasure, he wouldn't ruin the most important document in United States history to get it.

"The treasure of the Knights Templar is the treasure of all treasures." Ian was obviously trying to convince Ben that his idea was a good one.

"Oh, I didn't know that. Really?"

"And you wonder where I learned how to be so sarcastic." Lydia muttered to Riley.

"Look, Ben... I understand your bitterness. I really do. You've spent your entire life searching for this treasure, only to have the respected historical community treat you and your family with mockery and contempt, especially little Lydia,"

Lydia's face darkened. _Little?!_

"You know how much trouble she's had ever since she gave that history report about the treasure, with those kids making fun of her for what you do. You and Lydia should be able to rub this treasure in their arrogant, pubescent faces, and I want you to have the chance to do that."

"How?"

Lydia gasped and Riley clapped his hand over her mouth, shaking his head, Lydia ripped it away and hissed, "He can't honestly be thinking of..."

Riley shushed her abruptly, listening intently to what Ian was saying.

"We all have our areas of expertise. You don't think mine are limited to writing checks, do you?" Riley and Lydia looked at each other in dismay.

"In another life... I arranged a number of operations of... questionable legality," Ian kept talking.

"I'd take his word for it, if I were you." Shaw's voice had taken a sudden cold turn.

"So don't worry. I'll make all the arrangements." Lydia was horrified, shaking her head.

"No." Ben's voice was firm; it was obvious that stealing the Declaration was not an option.

"Good for you, say no to that idiot." Lydia hissed. Riley shushed her, trying to hear what Ian was saying.

"I really need your help here." Ian's tone had become coaxing as he tried to help Ben see the light.

"Ian... I'm not going to let you steal the Declaration of Independence."

"OK." Ian clearly wasn't pleased with Ben's response, "From this point on all you're going to be is a hindrance."

"What are you gonna do?" Ben asked, his voice suddenly terse. "Are you gonna shoot me, Shaw?"

Lydia gasped right out loud; _Shaw's pointing a gun at Dad!?_ She moved to open the door that separated her from her father, but Riley grabbed her shoulders, tugging her away from the door.

"No," he hissed, "Your dad told me to keep you away from Ian."

"But my dad could get shot!" Lydia cried, not caring if anyone heard.

"Well, you can't shoot me. There's more to the riddle." Lydia could hear her father's voice growing fainter as Riley pulled her farther away from the door."Information you don't have. I do."

Lydia tried to wrench her arms from Riley's "Ri-"she began, but Riley turned her around, clamping one of his hands over her mouth in an effort to keep her quiet.

"Lydia, please," Riley breath was in her ear. "I'm begging you, keep quiet, I'll explain everything, but we need to stay quiet."

"You..." Lydia started but Riley put one hand over her mouth again.

"Lydia, trust me, I'm on Ben's side but _please_, keep quiet."

"Tell me what I need to know, Ben, or I'll find Lydia and shoot her." Ian's voice suddenly came loud and clear through the bulkhead.

Riley released Lydia and stepped in front of her as if trying to get in between Lydia and Ian, even though the wall in front of them did a good enough job.

"Look where you're standing. All that gunpowder, you so much as turn around, I drop this, we all go up." Neither Riley nor Lydia could tell what was going on. What was Ben talking about?

"What happens .... burns down?" Lydia couldn't understand all that Ian had said. She stepped around Riley to press her ear up against the bulkhead, trying to hear what was going on. "Tell me what I need to know, Ben."

"You need to know... if Shaw can catch." Ben said.

There were a few moments of silence and then Ian's voice came once more. "Nice try, though." Then there was a shout and Lydia smelled smoke.

Without hesitation Lydia jammed her fingers into the knothole she was sure opened the door, it opened and smoke drifted into the hallway. There were flames in the cargo hold that Ben had found, apparently some barrels had gunpowder in them, and they were burning.

"Dad!" Lydia cried, running to her father's side.

"Lydia!" Riley's voice was frantic; the look on Ben's face was a combination of panic and relief.

Suddenly Lydia crashed to the floor, Riley was on top of her and wood chips were raining down on the two of them. Lydia looked up to find Shaw was pointing a gun at where she and Riley had been standing.

By the time Lydia had gotten up, Ian was at the door, looking at all three of them through the fire. He turned around and went out, shutting the door behind him.

"Riley, Lydia, get over here!" Ben yelled as he stomped on the floor of the ship; obviously he thought there was something under the floor.

Riley grabbed Lydia's arm and pulled her over to Ben. Lydia shook his hand off as Ben reached down and pulled open a trap door.

"Smuggler's hold! Get in!" Ben yelled. Lydia dropped down, Riley right behind her. Ben jumped in, closing the door behind him. The three crawled down the passageway, hoping to get as far away as possible before the flames reached all of the gunpowder.

They crept through a door, finally getting out of the smoke. Ben yelled at Riley and Lydia "Get down!" But no sooner did Ben close the door, than the ship exploded. Lydia hit the ground, trying to cover as much of her body as possible so she didn't get hurt. She felt two heavy weights land on top of her and groaned in pain, but tried not to move.

There was silence, then heavy breathing, Lydia tried to raise her head but something held it down, "Not yet," Her dad's voice was right by her ear, "The air is filled with smoke."

Lydia groaned in agreement and soon she felt the heavy weight rolling off of her. As she sat up she realized that her dad and Riley had fallen on top of her.

"Are you all right?" Ben asked, looking Lydia over, making sure she didn't have any major injuries.

"I'm fine, Dad." Lydia said, hugging him suddenly, "Thanks for standing up to Ian."

"I wasn't going to help him do anything illegal." Ben said quickly, getting up and dusting the snow off himself. "We'll have to get going, quick, because Ian's going to go back to the States."

"How are we going to get back?" Lydia asked.

"There's an Inuit Village about 9 miles east of here, it's popular with bush pilots," Ben said, looking around at the vast open arctic, trying to get his bearings.

"Then what are we going to do?" Riley asked, standing as well, "You know Ian's going to steal the Declaration of independence,"

"We stop him," Ben said, "We'll tell the proper authorities."

"Who are we going to go to first?" Riley asked, leaning back against one of the ships timbers.

"FBI, Homeland Security," Ben listed the two off but then hesitated. He couldn't think of anyone else to go to.

"That's it?" Lydia asked.

"I was thinking that you could go in as well." Ben said, "Riley and I can go in one day while you're in school, and then if they don't believe us we'll send you in after school. If they get the tip more than once they might take it more seriously."

"My question is..." Riley began, "How are we going to get to this Inuit Village?"

"We'll walk." Ben said, he started walking out of the broken ship.

Lydia stuffed her hands into her jacket pockets, ready to walk, when she felt something poke her through she pulled it out to look at it.

"Hey!" She caught both her Dad and Riley's attention, holding up the set of keys that Ian had given her when she'd gone to get her ear muffs.

"Can I drive the snowmobile?"

* * *

"Is it really so hard to believe that someone's going to steal the Declaration of Independence?"

It was four days later and Ben, Riley and Lydia had all gotten the same response from both the FBI and Homeland Security. The Declaration was safe and nothing could happen to it.

"The FBI gets 10,000 tips a week, they're not going to worry about something that they're sure is safe." Ben said, pacing in the middle of the sidewalk, failing to notice that he was blocking several people who were attempting to pass him.

"Anyone who can do anything thinks we're crazy, and anyone crazy enough to believe us isn't gonna want to help." Riley said, shaking his head.

"We don't need someone crazy. But one step short of crazy, what do you get?"

"Obsessed," Riley gave a short laugh.

"Passionate?" Lydia guessed.

Ben nodded at his daughter. "Right,"

"And I think I know the right person to help us out." Ben grinned. He turned, walking determinedly down the street; since Ben was at least a head taller than his daughter his long strides forced Lydia to jog to keep up with her dad and Riley.

"Who?" Lydia asked.

"I'll show you." Ben promised as they reached the car. He unlocked it and Riley and Lydia slid in. "I've got to make a phone call first though."

Once they were home, Ben went to the computer, pulled up an internet page and started typing; soon he was clicking open a page; apparently he had found the page he was looking for, and his eyebrows furrowed as he started reading it.

As her father surfed the internet, Lydia went to freezer and pulled out a pint of ice cream; she hoisted herself onto the counter top and grabbed a spoon from the dish drainer. Riley was flipping through some paper work but he looked up as Lydia opened the package. When his eyes lit up, Lydia turned to grab another spoon. She handed it to Riley and finished opening the ice cream. She dug the spoon in and came up with a heaping serving, and then slid the tub over to Riley. As she was doing so, Ben picked up the phone. He dialed a number and waited for someone to pick up.

"Mhhhhhmmmm," Riley moaned, Lydia looked over to the man in alarm and saw his face pinched up in pain.

"What is it, Riley?" Lydia asked.

"Mhhm," Riley slammed his hand down on the counter in pain. Lydia got off the counter and stepped over to him.

"Oh my god, Riley, what is it?" Lydia asked, genuinely concerned. She was about to get her Dad's attention when Riley let out a breath and squeaked, "Brain freeze, I ate too much at once."

Lydia rolled her eyes "Oy." She muttered, getting back up on the counter.

Once Lydia had finished her spoonful of ice cream, she set the spoon down and rubbed her eyes.

"Ugh." She muttered, hopping off of the counter and grabbing a case by her backpack.

"What's wrong?" Riley asked, scooping up another spoonful of ice cream.

"My contacts are bugging me." Lydia replied, opening her eyes wide and starting to remove the contact lens. Riley just looked at Lydia with wide eyes, the sixteen-year-old got one contact out and she put it in the case by her hand, then she squirted some solution onto it.

"I could never figure out how to do that." Riley said, "And I've tried."

"It takes practice." Lydia said. She leaned her head back and took the other contact out, blinking to get used to the sensation of not having her contacts in. She took another case out of her backpack and slid her glasses up her nose.

"I can be there at 5:30." Ben's voice suddenly got Riley and Lydia's attention.

Lydia's eyes lit up. _Where's Dad going?_ Lydia wondered _ I hope he's going today; maybe I can tag along_.

"Thank you." After a moment Ben said good bye and hung up.

"Can I come?" Lydia asked. "My homework is done, I promise."

"Yeah, both of you can come," Ben said, "Dr. Chase might take me more seriously if there's more than one person to back up my story."

"That didn't stop the FBI or Homeland Security," Lydia shrugged, taking another spoonful of ice cream.

"Just go get ready." Ben said, shaking his head at his daughter's last comment.

Half an hour later, Ben, Lydia and Riley were en route to Dr. Chase' office. On the way, Ben explained that he would do the talking, and he just wanted Lydia and Riley to agree with him.

"That's pretty much all we do anyway, Dad." Lydia said with a smirk as she sat back in her seat.

Soon they were in the outer office of Dr. Chase. "Lydia, hand me one of those." Ben pointed to a pamphlet that said something about a gala. Lydia handed one to him and picked another one up, wondering what had caught her father's interest.

"Dr. Chase will see you**,** Mr. Brown." The eager assistant said to the group. They all stood and Lydia stuffed the pamphlet into her purse as the three of them filed into the office.

"Mr. Brown?" Riley asked. "You never did explain why we're going by fake names, Ben."

"The family name doesn't get a lot of respect in the academic community." Ben's voice was low, as if he didn't want anyone to over here them.

"Huh, being kept down by the man." Riley said. It was then that they saw who Dr. Chase was.

"A very cute man," Lydia giggled, poking Riley.

"Good afternoon." Dr. Chase said, standing when they came into the room.

"Hi." Lydia replied, giving the woman a look; she had been expecting someone like a balding professor, not the pretty woman who was standing before them. How could she help keep the Declaration safe?

Dr. Chase came from around the desk, holding her hand out.

"Abigail Chase." She introduced herself and shook Ben's hand.

"Paul Brown." Ben introduced himself and gestured to Lydia, "This is my daughter, Jennifer."

"Nice to meet you," Dr Chase smiled at the girl and then held out her hand. Lydia shook it quickly.

"This is Bill." Lydia said, gesturing in Riley's general direction.

"Nice to meet you, Bill," Abigail seemed amused.

"How may I help you?"

"Your accent," Ben smiled slightly. "Pennsylvania Dutch?"

_Oh my god, is Dad flirting with her?_ Lydia thought suspiciously.

Dr. Chase flashed Ben a coy smile, "Saxony German."

_And she's flirting back?_

"You're not American?" Riley asked, causing Lydia to sigh. Riley could be so frustratingly naive.

"Oh, I am an American, I just wasn't born here." She began to sit. "Please don't touch that!" Dr. Chase's cry made Lydia and Riley turn; Ben had walked over to some old campaign buttons.

"Sorry. That's a neat collection. George Washington's campaign buttons. You're missing the 1789 Inaugural, though. I found one once." It seemed that Ben was trying to find common ground with the woman.

"That's very fortunate for you. Now, you told my assistant that this was an urgent matter?" As Dr. Chase was sitting down, she reminded the group of why they were there.

"Yes, ma'am. Well, I'm gonna get straight to the point." Ben sat down in the chair directly in front of her desk

"Someone's going to steal the Declaration of Independence." As he finished speaking he sighed a little, as if wishing it weren't true.

Dr. Chase didn't say anything, finally looking at Riley and Lydia for confirmation.

"It's true." Riley agreed.

"I heard him threaten to steal it myself." Lydia spoke up.**  
**

"I think I better put all of you in touch with the FBI." Dr. Chase said slowly, reaching towards the phone.

"We've been to the FBI." Ben said heavily.

"Twice," Lydia piped up again.

"And?"

"They assured us that the Declaration could not possibly be stolen." Riley said.

"They're right." Abigail shrugged slightly, helpless.

"We" Ben indicated the three of them, "are less certain. However, if we were given the privilege of examining the document... " Dr. Chase cocked her head to one side, as if unsure she'd heard right.

"We would be able to tell you for certain if it were actually in any danger." Ben finished.

"What do you think you're going to find?" She seemed amused again.

"We believe that there's an... encryption on the back." From the tone of Ben's voice, he knew how unbelievable this must sound to her.

"An encryption, like a code?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Of what?"

"A... cartograph."

"A map." Dr. Chase's voice fell flat; she was obviously having a hard time believing their story.

"Yes, ma'am."

"A map of what?"

"The location of..." Ben cleared his throat here, knowing that it was getting more and more unbelievable as he spoke "...of hidden items of historic and intrinsic value."

_Yeah, right. _Lydia thought_ she's going to see right through that and say--_

"A treasure map?"

_Bingo._

"That's where we lost the FBI." Riley muttered. Lydia nodded; she hadn't gotten very far with the FBI either.

"You're treasure-hunters, aren't you?" Dr. Chase obviously didn't believe their assertions.

"We're more like treasure-protectors." Ben corrected firmly.

"Mr. Brown," Dr. Chase spoke slowly**, **seeming to think that Ben needed to hear a careful explanation. "I have personally seen the back of the Declaration of Independence, and I promise you, the only thing there is a notation that reads…"

"Original Declaration of Independence, dated Fourth of July, 1776," Ben leaped in and quoted the rest of the notation with her. "Yes, ma'am."

"But no map," The blonde woman seemed to be waiting for an explanation; Ben looked over at Riley and Lydia.

"Tell her." Lydia mouthed.

Ben sighed and looked Dr. Chase in the eye. "It's invisible." He smiled slightly, knowing how ridiculous he sounded.

"Oh! Right," Dr. Chase said, Lydia didn't blame her for not believing them. She knew that if she hadn't heard Ian threaten to steal it himself she probably wouldn't believe their story either.

"Aaaand that's where we lost the Department of Homeland Security," Riley said.

"You got this far with them?" Lydia was surprised, "I only got as far as "Someone's going to steal the Declaration of Independence', and they kicked me out."

"What led you to assume there's this invisible map?" Dr. Chase asked, cutting off any response Riley could have given Lydia.

"We found an engraving on the stem of a 200-year-old pipe." Ben told her.

"Owned by Freemasons," Riley put in.

"May I see the pipe?" she asked.

Silence reigned for a moment before Lydia spoke. "We don't have it."

Dr. Chase leaned forward. "Did Big Foot take it?"

Lydia's disbelieving scoff was so quiet that only Riley heard it. _If she doesn't believe us, why doesn't she just say so? Does she have to make fun of us?_

"It was nice meeting you." Ben stood abruptly. Riley and Lydia stood as well, turning to leave the office.

"Nice to meet you, too."

"And, you know, that really is a nice collection." Ben gestured to the doctor's campaign button collection. "It must have taken you a long time to hunt down all that history."

They left, heading to the National Archives to look at the Declaration.

"If it's any consolation, you had me convinced." Riley said, trying to cheer Ben up.

"It's not." Ben was discouraged.

"I was thinking, what if we go public; plaster the story all over the internet?"

"It's not like we have reputations to worry about." Lydia deadpanned, sighing.

"Although I don't think that's exactly going to scare Ian away." Riley commented as they walked.

As they walked towards the Declaration, Lydia looked around, surprised that there were so few people. The few times she'd been here before, the building had been packed with observers and alert security guards.

"180 years of searching and I'm three feet away." Ben sighed, sounding resigned. "Of all the words written here about freedom, there's a line here that's at the heart of all the others." Ben said slowly.

"'But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security.'" Ben was whispering by the time he finished quoting the line. "People don't talk that way anymore."

"They think that way." Lydia spoke up from where she was looking at the Bill of Rights.

"Beautiful, huh?" Riley's voice was quiet. Lydia nodded in agreement.

"No idea what that meant though," Riley said, shaking his head.

"It means, if there's something wrong, those who have the ability to take action have the _responsibility_ to take action." Lydia said, looking up at her dad for confirmation; she got a nod but it was obvious his mind was elsewhere.

"I'm gonna steal it." Ben finally spoke.

There was a pause as what Ben said sunk in. Lydia and Riley turned to look at Ben, eyes wide. "What!?" They spoke in unison.

"I'm gonna steal the Declaration of Independence." Ben turned around and walked out of the National Archives.

"Ben?"

"Dad!?"

* * *

_Please review, toss me some love down in the review box ( or some hate, I'm chill with either.) lol_


	3. Chapter 3

Thank you for the reviews! I love them! and I'd like to thank my beta, Princess of Ithilien for helping me become a better writer.

**Chapter 3:**

"This is... huge." Riley, Lydia and Ben were sitting in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Lydia and Ben were sitting next to each other on the steps as Riley hovered over them, perhaps trying in vain to intimidate Ben into seeing things his way. "It's prison huge."

"You are gonna go to prison, you know that?" Lydia asked. Her green eyes were dark as she looked over at her dad.

"Yeah, probably," Ben shrugged, as if the idea of going to prison was of no concern to him.

"There is no _probably_ with this!" Lydia snapped. "I can't believe you're being so reckless, Dad!"

"Even the possibility of prison would bother most people." Riley muttered.

"Ian's gonna try and steal it. And if he succeeds, he'll destroy the Declaration." Ben stated. "The fact is, the only way to protect the Declaration is to steal it. It's upside down."

_There is no choice_. Lydia's conscience pricked at her. _He's right. If Ian steals the Declaration, he'll ruin it._

"Ben, for God's sake," Riley said, "It's like stealing a national monument. OK?" He gestured behind Lydia and Ben to the statue of Abraham Lincoln. "It's like stealing him."

Lydia sighed. "So how are you going to do it, Dad?" she asked. Though she hated to consider helping her dad break the law, she knew he wouldn't be able to do it alone.

Riley looked at Lydia, eyes wide. "You're going to help him?" He asked, not giving Ben the chance to answer his daughter's question.

"I don't like it." Lydia said firmly, folding her arms across her chest. "But it's not like we could stop him." She stood up now and started pacing. Because of the steps, Lydia and Riley were now eye to eye. "And if we can't stop him we might as well help because if we let him do it alone he would probably mess it up."

"It can't be done. Not 'shouldn't be done'." Riley said, shaking his head. "It _can't_ be done." Lydia and Ben just stared at him, their faces reaction-less.

He sighed, "Let me prove it to you."

Riley turned and strode away purposefully. Lydia and Ben looked at each other and shrugged, standing up and walking after him.

* * *

"Lydia, Ben, pay attention."

The trio had commandeered a table in the Library of Congress. It was strewn with various books each of them had taken from the shelves. Among the stacks of books were several loose sheets of paper, all pertaining to Riley's lesson.

"There are over 20 million books in this library; and they're all saying the same exact thing: listen to Riley."

Ben looked up from his book now, forcing a slight smile onto his face as he redirected his attention to Riley.

"What we have here, my friends, is an entire layout of the Archives."

"You've got construction orders, phone lines, water and sewage -it's all here." Riley gestured to some papers and then picked up a book and showed Ben and Lydia something.

"Now, when the Declaration is on display, it's surrounded by guards, and video monitors, and a little family from Iowa, and little kids on their eighth grade field trip."

Lydia nodded silently agreeing with Riley; she'd gone on the exact same field trip a few years before.

"And beneath an inch of bulletproof glass is an army of sensors and heat monitors that will go off if someone gets too close with a high fever." Riley turned the page and Lydia leaned up on one arm to get a closer look at the page.

"Now, when it's not on display, it is lowered into a four-foot-thick concrete, steel-plated vault." Riley's voice got firmer as he spoke. He lowered the book and Lydia grabbed it, still looking at the picture. Riley shrugged and kept talking, "That happens to be equipped with an electronic combination lock and biometric access-denial systems."

Ben's face was clear of emotion as he spoke, "You know, Thomas Edison tried and failed nearly two thousand times to develop the carbonized cotton-thread filament for the incandescent light bulb?" Ben seemed to be baiting Riley n an effort to make a point.

Riley raised an eyebrow. "Edison?" he asked, confused. Even Lydia had no idea what her dad was talking about.

"What does Edison have to do with this?" Lydia asked.

"When asked about it, he said, 'I didn't fail, I found out two thousand ways how not to make a light bulb.'" Ben smiled as he handed Riley a book.

"You've figured out how to do this, haven't you?" Riley asked, his eyebrows raised a little.

"The Preservation Room," There was a smile in Ben's voice as he passed the book over the partition separating them.

"Enjoy. Go ahead."

Lydia and Riley exchanged confused looks, Lydia had heard of the Preservation room, but what was her Dad thinking?

At seeing Riley's confused look, Ben spoke again, "Do you know what the Preservation Room is for?"

"Delicious jams and jellies?" Riley couldn't help but ask.

Lydia rolled her eyes. She wasn't annoyed, but she should have known that Riley would make a joke.

"No. That's where they clean, repair and maintain all the documents and the storage housings when they're not on display or in the vault." Ben explained, "When the case needs work, they take it out of the vault, and into the Preservation Room across the hall.

"The best time for us, or Ian, to steal it would be during the gala this weekend." Ben explained. "During the Gala, the guards will be distracted by the VIPs upstairs." Lydia nodded; that made sense.

"But we'll make our way to the Preservation Room, where there's much less security."

Riley turned a page in the book Ben had given him and finally spoke. "Well, if Ian..." He seemed to be trying to making up something that Ian could do. Riley turned back a page "Preservation... The Gala, huh?" Riley looked up in defeat. "This might be possible."

Ben nodded. "It might."

Lydia had a sudden thought "But if the Declaration is in the Preservation Room, wouldn't that make it easier for _Ian_ to steal it?" she paused, "you know if he actually knew it was there."

"Yes, but we'll have to make sure that we get there first." Ben said. He stood, picking up two of the books he'd gotten. "Let's go get copies of these pages and we can leave."

"Why don't we check them out?" Riley asked, "This is a Library, right?"

"It's not really a library..." Ben said. "It's more like fancy storage housing for books and it's _called_ a library." Ben finished "We can't borrow thembut we can get copies of these pages."

Lydia grabbed a couple of the books she'd asked for and flipped them open to the pages she wanted copied.

After getting the pages that they needed, the three of them went back to the Gates' apartment.

As soon as they were inside, Ben turned to Lydia. "I know you're not okay with this, but you're just like your mother. You won't vent unless I tell you to. So, let it out."

"Oh my god, Dad, are you freaking kidding me?" Lydia threw her backpack on the couch and turned to face her father. Her eyebrows were knit in anger. "The Declaration of Independence? Do we need to put you on suicide watch and take away your shoelaces?!"

"Lydia..." Although Ben had told his daughter to tell him what she was thinking, he suddenly felt the need to defend himself.

"You're lucky I'm not telling Grandpa." Lydia snapped, ignoring her father, "He'd be down here quick as anything to stop you from doing this." She took a breath.

"Dude, you're lucky I'm not telling _Nana_. You know as well as I do that she can convince you to do anything. She'd probably hog tie you to your bed until you've gotten this crazy idea out of your head!" Lydia's voice got higher. Ben sat down at the kitchen table and motioned for Riley to take a seat. The younger man was staring at Lydia; he'd never seen her so worked up over anything.

"It's like you didn't even think of _me,_ Dad. What's going to happen to me if you go to prison? Who am I going to live with?" Lydia started pacing now.** "**The only one with enough room is Grandpa. And you know that he won't like letting me spend time with Nana. Do you really think that I could handle that?" Lydia whirled to face her dad, "Losing my Dad and my Nana in one night? Neither of you will have died but I'll see so little of both of you that it'll screw me up big time!" Lydia threw her hands in the air.

"And then," Lydia had thought of something else. "Since I go to public school, I'll have to change schools."

"I thought you didn't like your school." Riley muttered. Lydia turned on him, her eyes flashing. Riley looked down and pretended to be very interested in the pattern of the stain on the table.

"I don't. And it's not like I'd be leaving friends behind because as of this afternoon I still don't have any, but I'm content here because I've known practically every kid in my high school since first grade. I could blackmail about half the kids in my high school with what I know about them." She seemed to be calming down slightly. Her voice had reached a normal level again.

Riley still looked confused and Ben took the opportunity to interrupt his daughter. "Are you done, Lydia?"

Lydia turned, glaring at him, but it softened when she saw the look on his face, she nodded, taking a shaky breath. "Yeah, and I didn't mean very much of what I just yelled." She told her dad. "I'm just..."

Ben nodded. "I know." He stood, pulling his daughter to him, "If we're lucky, we won't get caught, and then we'll find the treasure. Our names would be clear and everybody would love us and we'd be really rich."

Lydia nodded, sighing into the folds of her father's jacket. She still didn't like it but she resigned herself to what her father was going to do. Maybe he was right; if they worked hard enough, they would find the treasure before the authorities caught up to them, and none of it would matter.

"So, let's order a pizza and plan how to get the Declaration." Ben suggested.

Lydia's mouth curved up in a slight grin. "Half meat lover's?" She asked.

"Of course," Ben promised.

As Ben was ordering the pizza, Lydia and Riley got out paper and pencils, getting ready to brainstorm the details of breaking into the Archives.

"The pizza will be here in half an hour." Ben announced, hanging up the phone.

"Good, I'm starving." Riley said. He sat down at the kitchen table. As he stretched his legs out underneath, he accidentally kicked Lydia, who kicked him in the shin. Riley bit back a protest and gave Lydia a quick glare. She looked innocently up at her dad.

"Do either of you have ideas on how to do this?" She asked.

"Riley, you said that the sensors will go off if they get too hot?" Ben asked.

"Yeah," Riley said "We need to figure out a way to get the sensors hot enough to get the Declaration from the display to the Preservation Room.**"**

Four hours later, when Riley left the Gates' apartment, they'd polished off the pizza, half a gallon of ice cream and their master plan.

**_

* * *

_**

Lydia sighed impatiently, doodling in the margins of her notebook. Algebra was becoming boring; usually Mr. Weiss was more prepared than this, but today seemed to be an off day for him. When looking over the lesson earlier that day she had found the concept difficult to grasp but after a few minutes of studying she'd understood it. Her classmates obviously hadn't made the connection and they were still on the first page of the lesson.

As Lydia looked out the window she noticed the office aide, Dylan, walking down the hall. He was the resident genius at her school; he currently had only one class left until he would be able to graduate a year early. Lydia wasn't sure what period he had it because she'd seen him going on errands for the office during almost all her classes.

She turned back to the lesson to see if she'd missed anything. They had finally gotten to the second page. _And it only took thirty minutes of the class, _Lydia realized, turning the page in her math book.

The opening of the door diverted Lydia's attention again. Dylan was walking in. He made eye contact with Lydia and he nodded, telling her _yes, you're being called up to the office._

Lydia was confused. She was no stranger to Dylan or the office, as she had been sent to meet with the Vice Principal several times that year for correcting her history teacher. In addition to the fact that this was Algebra, she'd hardly said a word in history for the past week.

"I'm here to take Lydia Gates to the office." Dylan told her teacher.

"Someone's in trou-ble." One student drawled out the last word. Lydia didn't know who it was, but she threw a glare in the direction where the taunt had come from, grabbed her books and stood up.

"Pages 275 and 276 are homework." Mr. Weiss told her Lydia nodded and deposited her books into her backpack.

Once they were outside, Lydia turned to Dylan, "So what am I in trouble for?" Their roles had reversed. Typically, Dylan was the one asking Lydia what she had done that would require a summons to the office.

"I was about to ask you the same thing." Dylan said. "I'm beginning to think you don't like school, Lydia." He spoke as if she were six instead of sixteen.

_No really_ Lydia thought dryly, _whatever gave you that idea?_

"If you made less trouble in History then you'd have fewer behavioral notes on your school record." Dylan seemed to be going into lecture mode, and Lydia knew from sad experience that he could out-lecture the principle.

"But if I stopped making so much trouble in history, we wouldn't have such lovely conversations." Lydia interrupted innocently.

Dylan gave her a look "I'd get over it." he told her. He held a door open and Lydia walked into the front office.

"Hey all!" Lydia forced a cheerful smile onto her face; she knew it annoyed the secretary. "So Ms. Williams, what am I in here for?"

"You're going home early." Ms. Williams said, pointing to an empty chair. She consulted a Post-it note on her desk. "A Mr. Riley Poole should be here to pick you up at 1:30."

"Awesome." Lydia sat down and pulled a book out.

"If we're lucky maybe he's pulled her out for good." Although the secretary was speaking French, Lydia understood the general idea of it, having just taken a test on French verbs that morning.

Over the years, Lydia had overheard Ms Williams muttering in French. So, Lydia had signed up for French in her Sophomore year and since then, she'd figured out that Ms Williams hoped to travel to France one day and meet a gorgeous and independently wealthy Frenchman who would sweep her off her feet. To prepare for her trip to France she was learning to speak French

"Yeah, you know I speak French right?" Lydia asked from her seat.

Before the secretary had a chance to say anything, Riley opened the door to the office, "Hey Lydia, I've just got to show my ID to this woman and we'll get out of here." He said, attempting to flip his wallet open, television-cop style. It didn't work and he ended up slapping Ms. Williams in the face. He apologized as she glared at him and checked his driver's license. Lydia snorted, trying not to laugh.

After Riley showed the secretary his ID they both went out to Riley's waiting car. "So why am I being picked up early?" Lydia asked. "I thought that I was supposed to be picked up during study hall, that's not till next period."

"I don't know." Riley said, "Ben told me to call him after I'd picked you up." Riley handed his cell phone to Lydia. "You know the number." he said.

Lydia dialed her father's cell phone number. Once Ben picked up she asked. "Why is Riley picking me up early?"

"I need for you to go to the apartment and pack a bag for both of us tonight." Ben said, his voice echoing in the background. "On the chance that we're unable to spend the night at our place, I want you to have your things."

"Okay." Lydia said. She sighed and looked out at the passing buildings, "Have you delivered the campaign button yet?" She asked, referring to one of many crucial steps in their plan.

"Yeah, I'm just leaving the Archives." Ben said. It sounded like he was opening a door and then he spoke again, "Do we need to go over your part in the plan Lydia?"

"Go to the Gala with you as a security trainee, change, help you find Dr. Chase." Lydia emphasized the Dr. Chase part. Her father had gotten into the habit of referring to Dr. Chase as Abigail, which Lydia found to be annoying.

"Make sure you don't stand around flirting with her and completely forget to get a copy of the Declaration in the gift shop." Lydia reminded him. They'd gone over this what seemed like a hundred times in the past few days.

"Wait, you added something." Ben interrupted. Lydia could tell he was smiling. Riley pulled up to Ben and Lydia's apartment complex and they both got out. Lydia left her backpack in the van and pulled her keys out of her pocket.

As they went into the apartment Ben kept talking "What are you talking about, make sure I don't flirt with her?"

"Umm Dad, no offense but you're not the best flirt." Lydia said delicately.

"I can flirt." Ben defended himself.

Lydia rolled her eyes and attempted not to laugh. "Maybe I can give you a few tips?" She offered, not wanting to get into a fight with her dad.

"Fine," Ben relented then he seemed to think of something. "You don't know how to flirt either. At least, you'd better not."

"When are we meeting you where?" Lydia changed the subject so she wouldn't have to answer her father's comment that she better not know how to flirt.

"Riley knows," Ben said, "Just pack a bag for each of us and we'll get going."

"Okay." Lydia said, "Do you have your suit with you?" She opened the closet in the hall and tucked the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she rooted around, looking for their duffel bags.

"Yeah," Ben said.

"Okay, Dad, see you later." Lydia said, and then hung up.

"My dad just wants me to grab some clothes and stuff, just in case." Lydia announced to Riley as she finally located the bags.

"Okay." Riley followed Lydia into Ben's room. She tossed the duffel bag at Riley and grabbed a t-shirt and a pair of jeans from the closet. She threw them over her shoulder for Riley to catch. She pulled open a drawer and threw some socks at Riley, barely suppressing a grin as he tried to juggle the bag and the clothes. She threw a pair of sweat pants and a sweatshirt at him too, and laughed when he ended up dropping everything but the pair of socks. "Gee Riley, thanks for dropping everything."

"Are you going to be bringing anything to do in the van?" Riley asked following Lydia as she went into her room.

"Yeah, there's a Sudoku book on the kitchen table." Lydia said. "And I've got my school books in the van.

Lydia grabbed a pair of pajamas and stuffed them in her bag and then threw a T-shirt and an extra pair of jeans in it. "Riley, turn around." Lydia ordered.

"Why?" Riley asked.

"Because I need to get some…things and I don't want you looking." She explained.

"Why don't you want me looking?" Riley asked, completely clueless.

"Because it's girl stuff." Lydia said.

"I've been around girls before." Riley protested.

"Riley, turn around or you're fired!"

"You're not my boss!"

"But I'm your boss's daughter." Lydia shot back, continuing their childish argument. "If you had turned around when I asked you to..."

"You didn't ask, you ordered." Riley interrupted.

"Still, if you had turned around when I said so, then I would have been able to get it quickly and we'd be on our way out of here." Lydia said.

"Fine," Riley turned around. "Do you want me to close my eyes too?" he asked sarcastically.

"That would be nice. Thank you for offering." Lydia said snippily. She pulled open her sock drawer and pulled out a pair of socks and a package of feminine pads she stuffed them in the duffle and grabbed a bra from another drawer. After grabbing a small case of makeup and her curling iron, she stuffed it all into various pockets and made sure everything was zipped up.

"Okay, I'm done." She said, she waited until Riley had left her room and turned the light off. She gave her backpack to Riley to take to the front room. He looked at it suspiciously, as though she had packed weapons of mass destruction as opposed to mascara and a hairbrush.

"What are we going to be doing until the Gala?" She asked as they walked through the small apartment.

"First thing's first. We gotta get the Declaration into the Preservation Room. If we actually manage to pull that off, we'll take things from there." Riley said as they came into the living room.

"Okay," Lydia said, checking to make sure all of the lights were turned off. She grabbed the Sudoku book from the kitchen table and noticed that the folder with the Silence Do-Good letters was gone.

_Dad must have grabbed it on the way out the door after I went to school_. Lydia thought, shrugging. She locked the door behind her and went out to the van with Riley.

Riley turned to her as she climbed into the passenger seat. "Ready?" he asked, drumming out a nervous beat on the steering wheel.

Lydia shook her head and wryly half-grinned. "Nope."

* * *

_Please review, I would love to get some love in the review box (or some hate, I'm chill with either.)_


	4. Chapter 4

**Yeah, I know it's been FOREVER and a day since I posted, for that I'm sorry. I've been busy, something called real life got in the way sadly enough, but I've managed to make it stop interupting me long enough to get this (and most of next) capter written. I'll be posting with more regularity from now on, I promise. ****Thank you to my editor Princess of Ithilien for making this chapter work better and putting up with my mistakes, she's great.**

**Happy Reading!**

Chapter 4: 

The van pulled out into the street and Riley headed towards the highway. They were in rural Alexandria, Virginia and it would take about twenty minutes to get back to the heart of Washington DC.

As Riley pulled onto the highway, his cell phone buzzed. Lydia grabbed it from the cup holder where Riley had tossed it when they got in the van. She figured he would let it go to voice mail since he was driving. When she saw that it was her dad she flipped the phone open with her thumb. "Hey Dad, what's up?"

"I've got a Security trainee uniform for you; I hope it's the right size." Ben got right down to business.

"I'll make it fit if it isn't," Lydia promised.

"You and Riley heading …Archives?" Ben's voice was cutting in and out. Lydia couldn't tell what he had said so she started shifting around in her seat, trying to get a better signal.

"Dad, I-" She opened the window, sticking her head out as far as she dared; attempting to get a better signal.

"Lydia Emmaline, keep your hands, arms and _head_ inside the vehicle at all times!" Riley snapped, using Lydia's middle name. "The last thing we need is for the cops to come pick us up because you're treating this van like a rollercoaster."

"I can't hear you, Dad." Lydia said, ignoring Riley. She pulled her head back in and tucked the phone between her ear and her shoulder. Leaning forward to roll the window up, she accidentally blocked Riley's view of the right hand lane.

"Lydia, now you're blocking my view! I need to see the next lane. Sit back." Riley ordered.

Lydia gave Riley a look that told him she didn't appreciate being ordered around. She sat back in her seat and reached underneath to find the lever to scoot the seat backwards.

"Whoa!" As Lydia pulled on the lever, Riley pressed on the gas and the seat went shooting backwards, halting abruptly as it reached the end of the track.

Riley was obviously trying to control his laughter as Lydia frowned at him. "You did that on purpose, didn't you?"

"I'm pleading the fifth amendment on this one." Riley said, pulling over into the emergency lane. He put the van in park and turned the emergency blinkers on. He turned to Lydia. "Let's see if staying still gets you a better signal."

"Dad?" Lydia spoke into the phone again.

"Yeah?" The signal was still poor but Lydia could hear her father.

"What was the last thing you said?" Lydia asked.

"I said make sure you start getting ready for the Gala early, I know you take a long time."

"Okay, Dad." Lydia said she pulled the seat forward and got comfortable in her seat again.

"Anything else?" She asked, staring out the window at the passing cars.

"Do what Riley says." Ben told her, "I know you don't like following orders but do what he says."

"All right Dad." Lydia tried not to get too annoyed; her dad was just repeating himself now.

"I've got to get other things ready," Ben said. He was starting to break up again, and he quickly ended the conversation. "Bye, Lydia."

"Bye Dad, love you." Lydia said. After closing the phone, she dropped it back into the cup holder.

"Are you done?" Riley asked.

Lydia nodded. "Yeah," she said. Riley pulled back into traffic, easing his way into the middle lane.

"What'd he say?" Riley asked.

"He just reminded me to start getting ready for the Gala early because I take along time." Lydia said. She turned her head to look at Riley, "Do you think we'll be able to do this?"

There was a long pause as Riley slowed down a little bit and let a woman in a minivan change lanes in front of him. Just as Lydia was beginning to wonder if he'd even heard her, he turned to look at her for a second then turned back to the road. He finally spoke. "Ask me again if the Declaration gets into the Preservation Room."

**_

* * *

_**"Okay Lydia, we're going to be using this video camera to heat up the sensor to get the Declaration into the Preservation Room," Riley and Lydia were back in the heart of Washington DC. They had just parked in a public parking garage close to the Archive building.

"You'll put a pen light on it and use that to heat up the sensor, and that will tip off people like Dr. Chase and they'll take the Declaration into the Preservation Room." Lydia said quickly. There was a pause as Riley looked at Lydia in surprise. "I was there when you and Dad planned this." She reminded him.

"So I was thinking that only one of us would have a camera and the other one could just be looking around." Riley said. "Maybe you should stick with me, you don't want to get lost or have Dr. Chase find you accidentally."

"You're right," Lydia agreed. "What's with the stay-close-to-me attitude, Riley?" she asked, digging through her backpack and grabbing a hair tie from a smaller pocket. She pulled her hair up into a ponytail as Riley answered.

"Your father asked me to keep an eye on you. We don't know if Ian knows we're still alive or not, but he'd rather not let Ian get his hands on you."

"He worries too much." Lydia rolled her eyes.

She shook her head slightly and turned to Riley.

"Why don't you have the camcorder and I can have a spiral notebook and pretend to take notes?" She got an idea and quickly added. "I'll take my backpack in and then I'll look like a student."

Riley nodded. "Good idea." Lydia bent forward, unzipping the backpack that was at her feet, pulling out a notebook and a pen. She didn't move to get out of the van as Riley was making sure that the laser pen was properly attached to the camcorder.

Once Riley was done he opened his door. Lydia got out too, flattening herself against the vehicle when another car pulled into the slot on the passenger side of the van.

"How long do you think it'll take to heat up the sensor?" She asked as the two of them went to the stairs. They'd had to park on the second level of the parking structure and they began to walk down the stairs to the main level.

Lydia could see the Archive building across the street and took in a nervous breath; they couldn't back out after this.

**_

* * *

_**Lydia rubbed her hands over her eyes as she leaned back in her seat. She and Riley had returned to the van in a hurry after their attempt to activate the heat sensors on the Declaration's case. Riley had only had his pen light focused on the sensor for a few moments when one of the security guards walked over to look at it. He'd spoken into his walkie-talkie and looked around at the people near the case.

"I still think you didn't have the pen light on the sensors long enough." Lydia said, opening a bag of potato chips she'd found in Riley's van. She put one in her mouth and started chewing. Almost immediately, her face wrinkled up in distaste. She turned the bag around until she located the expiration date. Lydia opened the bag again and spit the remains of the chips in it.

"Dude, these chips are like three years old." She said, "I'm throwing them away."

Riley didn't even glance up from the computer monitor he was staring at. "Salt and Vinegar chips are like a fine wine, they taste better with age."

"Not these." Lydia disagreed as she folded the bag top down and put a binder clip on it to keep the bag from opening.

Riley kept staring at the screen and Lydia leaned back in her seat. It was the first time all day she'd had the chance to relax; all three of them had been on the go since six this morning.

She turned her head when there was a noise outside the van, it was a small family, a girl, who was the oldest child, looked to be about six, and there was a boy, about two years younger. Both of them were holding the hand of the grownups who were obviously their parents. Lydia smiled when the girl grinned up at her dad who then picked the young girl up and set him on his shoulders. _I remember when Dad used to do that with me._

There was laughing and Lydia glanced to the boy and his mother. She had picked him up and was tickling him. Even though he was trying to get away from the 'tickle monster' it was obvious that the boy loved his mother.

The view suddenly grew blurry and Lydia looked down as a couple of tears fell. She quickly wiped them up and hoped Riley hadn't noticed.

"Hey Lydia," Riley looked up from the computer, grinning. "Our evil plan is wor-." Riley paused as he saw the tears in Lydia's eyes. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing." Lydia said, she wiped her eyes with a towel Riley kept in the back, and then looked at the computer as the Declaration was finally put into the Preservation Room. "Cool, hey, umm how did you hijack the video without them figuring it out?" Lydia asked trying to change the subject.

Riley hesitated and Lydia took the chance to tease him "What? You don't remember?" she taunted, smiling at him to show she wasn't trying to be rude.

"Are you sure you're okay Lydia?" he asked, "You're not really the type to cry."

"I'm fine, Riley." Lydia interrupted him quickly.

"Look, if it's a female thing just tell me and I'll stop bugging you."

"Fine." Lydia at once "It's a girl thing."

"Why don't you call your mom and talk to her about it?" Riley asked.

"Cause she left." Lydia snapped. "You know what, Riley?" Lydia continued talking before he could react, "I really don't want to talk about it, please don't make me."

"Okay." Riley said.

"Thanks," Lydia said quietly. She straightened, "Hey, since the Declaration is now in the Preservation Room, could you please leave and let me change for the Gala?"

"There's a bathroom in the building next to us." Riley objected, gesturing out the window to where there was some sort of office building.

Lydia simply raised an eyebrow at Riley. The man sighed and turned. "Just don't knock anything over." He said as he got up, grabbing the bag of potato chips and sliding the door open.

Lydia climbed over one seat and pulled out the silver reflective shield Riley used to keep the car cool on a hot day. She crawled backwards and then pulled off the top she had worn to school. She put a tank top on and got out the skirt and sweater she'd packed for the Gala.

She laid them out on a stack of boxes in the back of the van, not wanting to put them on and get them dirty before the Gala. She didn't know what they were having for dinner and she didn't want to risk getting either piece dirty. She'd change again when the Gala was about to start.

"I'm done with everything except for my make up." Lydia said as she attempted to pull open the door of the van. It fought her but then yanked open. Riley was looking a little sheepish; it was clear that he'd been leaning up against it.

Riley climbed in and stuffed the bag of potato chips into a large black trash bag. "You know, I think you're right about these chips, they taste a little weird."

Lydia paused and debated with herself about telling Riley that she'd spit into the bag. _Better not_. She pulled out a tube of mascara; she opened it up and pumped it up and down trying to get a good amount of it on the brush.

There was silence in the van as Lydia did her eye makeup. She had managed to position a hand mirror on a stack of boxes in one corner of the van. As she was getting her lip gloss out, she happened to look up. Riley was looking at her with an odd look on his face as if he'd never seen her before.

"What is it?" Lydia asked. She turned back to her bag and got out a few gloss containers. She screwed the top off of one and looked at the contents, closed it, and tossed it in her bag again. She realized Riley hadn't said anything and she looked up again.

"Riley." Her voice had grown a little sharper and it got the man's attention.

"What?"

"Why are you looking at me so weird?" Lydia asked.

Riley finally replied and looked genuinely confused as he spoke. "You look like a girl." He spoke the last word as if he were not accustomed to using it and was unsure of the pronunciation.

"Riley, your grasp of the obvious never fails to astound me." Both Lydia and Riley turned at Ben's voice. He was at the open van door and started to say something but then caught sight of Lydia. "Why aren't you wearing your sweater?" He asked.

"Because it's like 90 degrees in here, I'd rather not sweat out of it before the Gala." Lydia explained, reaching into her bag again, knowing what her father's next order would be.

"Put a T-Shirt on."

"Doing it." Lydia said, pulling a dark red T-shirt over her tank top. _Dads can totally over react sometimes, it's just a tank top, and it's not like my bra was showing._

"What's for dinner?" Lydia asked.

"Porky's Pizza," Ben said, holding up a menu. "Decide what you want now before I call them." He told her, handing the menu to his daughter.

Lydia grabbed it and scooted closer to Riley so that he could see the menu as well.

**_

* * *

_**"Lydia, let's go!" Ben said, banging on the van door for the fourth time.

"I'm not done yet!" Lydia called. Lydia had waited for the very last minute to put her skirt on and it was taking more time then she had thought it would.

"I'm leaving in a minute whether you're ready or not." Ben threatened. The words carried no weight, because all three knew that Ben would wait for his daughter.

The van door pulled open and Lydia emerged. She was still putting her earpiece in but she had on a security trainee uniform, with two pockets that were bulging slightly. One pocket held her skirt, it had taken Lydia a few minutes, but she'd figured out she couldn't have her uniform and her skirt on at the same time, she'd finally folded it up and put it in one of her pockets. The other pocket held her purse. She figured it would look suspicious if a girl in a security trainee uniform came in with a fancy purse, but she needed it for when she was at the Gala.

"There, I'm done." She said it tartly but with a smile. Riley got back into the van, his nose wrinkling as he smelled the perfume Lydia had put on a minute before.

"Ben, are you sure that we should-" Riley started, Ben ignored the younger man and slammed the door shut.

Both Lydia and Ben strode up to the back entrance. "Can you hear me?" Ben asked Riley through the head piece.

"Unfortunately, yes." Riley said unhappily.

"What about me?" Lydia asked.

"Yes, Lydia, I can hear you too." Riley said.

"Why can't I hear Dad?" Lydia asked, stopping in the middle of the street. "I mean I heard him, but not through the headset."

"Because you're on a different wavelength." Riley replied, "Besides, the two of you are going to be together the entire time, right?"

"But what if-" Lydia started.

"If we get separated I'll get a message to you through Riley." Ben promised.

"Works for me," Lydia replied. She ran a hand over her hair and realized she had forgotten one crucial aspect of her outfit. She yanked a ball cap from one of the many pockets of her uniform and crammed it down on her head. At her father's look, she grinned.

"Security trainees don't wear eye shadow and mascara."

They had gotten close to the back entrance now and father and daughter exchanged a nervous glance, hoping that their badges were good enough to get them through the door.

"Act like you know where you're going." Ben instructed in a whisper.

Lydia nodded and forced herself to look confident. Though they had passes, someone still might stop them if they didn't look like they belonged.

The security guard barely glanced at them as they walked by; he just nodded to both Ben and Lydia when they pointed to their badges.

After getting through the metal detectors, Lydia and Ben split up at the bathrooms. Lydia quickly changed and, after reapplying her lip gloss, went out to catch up to Ben, but he wasn't there. She waited for a minute and when he still hadn't come out she spoke to Riley quietly. "Riley, is Dad okay?"

"I'm talking to him right now, he's coming out." Riley said. "Mazel Tov."

"And he's out." Lydia said as Ben came out.

"Lydia, I want you to go get a copy of the Declaration. I don't want to be here any longer then we have to be." Ben said quietly. He got out his wallet and dug a few bills out of it. "Here, it shouldn't be any more than that."

"Okay." Lydia took the money and turned to go to the gift shop. She and Riley had scoped it out earlier in the week, so she knew where it was. "Dad?" she asked, turning back to her father.

"Yeah?"

"If you find Dr. Chase, could you tell Riley to tell me?" She asked.

"Sure." Ben nodded and both Gates family members turned and headed in opposite directions.

Lydia quickly found the gift shop and went inside, noting with relief that the cashier behind the counter was a different one than the one she'd seen earlier in the week She didn't want to make somebody suspicious.

"How much is a copy of the Declaration?" Lydia asked, wishing that she and Riley had asked that earlier in the week.

"Thirty five dollars," The lady replied.

Lydia dug the money out of her purse and bit her lip after she had counted it**. **"I-"she drawled the sound out. "...only have thirty two. I'll be right back." She promised, gathering up the money. _You'd think with all the junk I put in here I would have some cash on me_. Lydia thought, making sure her clutch was closed.

"Riley, do you have any cash?" She whispered after she'd left the gift shop. She smiled at a passing couple as she waited for him to reply.

There was silence for a moment; Riley was probably looking in his wallet. "I've got a fifty, why?"

"Because I'm trying to buy the copy but Dad didn't give me enough money." Lydia tried to keep her voice down, but one passerby still looked up. Lydia held her hand to her ear, as if she were talking on a cell phone.

"Come outside, I'll give you the money." Riley replied "But when we find the treasure I want my fifty dollars back."

"Of course." Lydia promised. Halfway to the door she realized she couldn't leave because she had no way of getting back in the main entrance. With a sigh, she returned to the restroom near the back entrance and dug the uniform out of the trash bin. Her face contorted as the ripe smell of a diaper met her olfactory sense.

"Eww," She said, carefully inspecting the garment to make sure that the diaper hadn't left any remnants of its contents on her uniform. Not wanting to take the skirt off again, she simply rolled it up around her waist and zipped the uniform up, making sure the skirt didn't get caught. She grabbed the hat out of the trash but after discovering that it had gotten wet she dropped it back in she didn't want to risk having the dampness be from the diaper.

Sticking the thirty two dollars back in her pocket she spoke into the head piece again, "I'm coming out now Riley."

"Come on Romeo, get out of there." Riley said suddenly.

"What?" Lydia asked.

"Your dad's talking to that hot girl." Riley informed her.

"You mean he's talking to Dr. Chase?" Lydia asked. She was leaving the building now and she nodded to the security guard who was guarding the back entrance.

"Hey Riley, is there any way I can listen in on Dad's microphone too?" Lydia asked.

"Nope, I'm sorry." Riley apologized as he rolled the driver's side window down a little bit and stuck a fifty and a pair of pliers out the window.

"So you actually have a reason to be out here." He said, explaining the pliers. "If the security guard asks."

Lydia nodded and took the pliers and the money. She turned, sticking both into different pockets as she walked back across the street.

After getting back through security she went to the bathroom and changed again. She folded the uniform again and stuck it behind a toilet this time "In case I need to come back," she muttered to herself.

As she was walking back to the gift shop, she glanced into the main room where the Gala was taking place. What she saw made her stop in her steps.

"Oh, crap." Lydia said. "I knew I shouldn't have left him alone." Her voice took on the petulant half-whine of a child.

"Lydia what happened? Is Ben okay? He's not answering me."

"He's fine." Lydia said with a resigned sigh.

"What happened?"

The disgust was thick in Lydia's voice as she replied, "He's trying to flirt."

* * *

_Please review!_


	5. Chapter 5

**See, I promised I'd update sooner the I did last time and I did. :) I'll update my What if Lily Lived Year three soon, I'm working on the chapter right now. (well once I post this I'll work on it) ****Thank you to my editor Princess of Ithilien for making this chapter work better and putting up with my mistakes, she's great.**

**Happy Reading!**

Chapter 5: 

From across the room, Lydia could see her father and two other people raising their glasses. Curious, she walked close enough to hear what her father was saying. "A toast to high treason;" Ben began. "That's what these men were committing when they signed the Declaration. Had we lost the war, they would have been hanged, beheaded, drawn and quartered, and - Oh!" it was obvious Ben had just thought of something "or, my personal favorite -and had their entrails cut out and burned!"

"Dude, I flirt better than he does." Lydia told Riley. "And now he's giving Dr. Chase this really intense look and it's completely obvious he just wants to make out with her."

Dr. Chase and the other man took sips started to take sips from their champagne glasses but Ben completely downed his. Lydia sighed, "I can't watch." She told Riley. She went back to the gift shop and walked around for a moment. She didn't want to look like she was too determined to get a Declaration; it might cause suspicion. She started looking through a few Rosie the Riveter hoodies. There was a sale going on, the sweatshirts were forty percent off. Finally Riley spoke.

"This better work."

"What's happening?" Lydia whispered.

"Your dad's getting Dr. Chases' fingerprint from the glass." Riley explained.

"How does it look?" Lydia asked quietly

"It's working…"

Lydia smiled. "Great."

"Unbelievable." Riley said.

Lydia grinned but then caught sight of the cashier looking at her. Lydia held up the hoodie she was standing by. "This is so cute." She proclaimed. The cashier smiled, faintly.

"We're in the elevator." Riley told Lydia, who whispered an "Uh huh," as she pretended to inspect the garment.

"I hope they have my size." Lydia murmured realizing the cashier was still looking at her.

"OK."

"I'm gonna turn off the surveillance cameras. Ready?"

Lydia finally looked at the hoodie and realized that it actually was pretty cute. She'd been too distracted to notice the design: it was a picture of Rosie the Riveter with a quote, "We can do it" Lydia smiled faintly at the idea that Rosie was cheering her and her dad on; like they could make sure Ian didn't steal the Declaration. She decided to buy it. She had some cash back at the apartment; she could pay Riley back with that.

"In five, four, three... Now." There was a bit of static but it cleared up almost instantly. "Ben Gates," it suddenly sounded like Riley had something in his mouth, "you are now the Invisible Man."

Lydia looked through the hoodies to see if they had one in her size. She grabbed a medium and fell in to the line for the cashier.

"Give me the letters for her password." Riley said in the background. There was a pause. "What do you got for me? Hit me with it." There was another pause, "Okay, anagrams being listed."

The cashier finished with one person and the line crawled forward a little bit. Lydia was now standing by a hat stand with navy blue and khaki hats. There was another sale going on with the hats. Two hats for 15 dollars. She inspected the hats and decided not to buy any as Riley kept talking.

"Top results:" Riley started listing some of them off; "A glove fry, a very golf," Lydia knew that the password would have something to do with American history but what part? Colonial history or Civil War history? Or would it even be as recent as World Wars I and II?

"Valey frog. Also, ago fly rev, grove fly a, are fly gov, era fly gov, elf gov ray...."

The line crept up some more and Lydia was now by a display table of puzzles. Lydia picked one up; the picture was of it was of a cabin and a nearby trail, Lydia turned the box around and saw that it was a picture of Valley Forge.

"Valley Forge," Lydia spoke out loud before she realized it. "Wow, this picture is of Valley Forge." She said in response to the questioning looks several people directed at her.

"Yeah, all the puzzles are pictures are of Valley Forge." The man behind Lydia started talking about how the different puzzles were of the different seasons at Valley Forge and one was an old painting of George Washington at Valley Forge. Lydia tuned him out for a second as Riley started talking.

"How do the two of you do that?" Riley asked, "Lydia, how in the world did you figure out the password? Ben just said it was Valley Forge too."

"We're in." Riley said as the line crept forward a little more.

"Hello." Riley went into a British accent and Lydia turned her attention back to the man behind her to make sure that he didn't want a response from her. He was still chattering on, now detailing Washington's time at Valley Forge.

"Ben, you're doing great." Lydia heard Riley say. The line crept up a little more and Lydia leaned up against a case. Her feet were starting to hurt. She wished she could take her shoes off. Even though they weren't heels; they were about half a size too small, which she hadn't realized when she'd put them on earlier.

"Ben pick it up. You got about one..."

Lydia realized the line had crept up again and she moved forward as Riley suddenly stopped talking. "I lost my video feed."

"What?" Lydia asked in shock, forgetting for a moment she didn't have privacy and that people around her could hear. The clerk looked up and the person in front of Lydia in line turned around and Lydia kept talking to try and divert attention away from her, "Only 15 dollars for this uber cute Rosie the Riveter hoodie? What an awesome price!"

"I don't know where anyone is. I have nothing." Riley was starting to sound a little scared. Lydia felt a wave of panic wash over her. She had a feeling Ian was behind this and if he was, it could only end badly.

"Ben, I have no... Ben, I have nothing." Riley was freaking out. "Get out of there. Get out of there now."

"What are you talking about? Is it heavy?" Riley suddenly asked.

Lydia started bouncing on the balls of her feet, she knew she had to get the fake Declaration but she really wanted to know what was going on. She got an idea and opened her purse, pulling out her cell phone as though it had been vibrating. This way she could talk to Riley without getting any weird looks.

"Hey Riley, what's up?" she asked.

"There's a lot of noise Lydia, don't talk, just get out there as fast as you can!" Riley broke off suddenly and then he spoke again. "What was that? Who's shooting?"

"What?" Lydia asked, alarmed. "What's going on?"

Riley completely ignored Lydia and talked to Ben. "Are you still there? Ben?"

"What's going on?" Lydia asked, "I-I can't hear you Riley." She lied, knowing the people in line would overhear.

"Lydia, your dad wants me to tell you to get out of there as soon as possible, Ian's here, get out to the van as soon as possible!" Riley insisted.

"I'm in line at the gift shop." Lydia said, "But I'll be out as soon as possible."

"Ben should be coming down soon; he got the Declaration out in the elevator."

"Okay, I'll talk to you later, Riley." Lydia said.

Just as Lydia turned her cell phone off; Ben came walking in. The lady in front of her went up to the counter and Lydia had to fight the tears that came into her eyes. It took every ounce of willpower she had not to fling herself into her father's arms.

Ben smiled and went over to Lydia. He was obviously shook up but he hugged her. "Having a good time tonight, Jennifer?" he asked. During dinner they'd made plans to go by the names that they'd given Dr. Chase earlier in the week.

"I'm doing fine. I was thinking of getting the Declaration."

Ben pointed to the sweatshirt and looked confused for a moment, "They were on sale." Lydia explained. "And look how cute this is." Lydia showed Ben the design on the front.

"Hello." The clerk said. Lydia looked up and realized that she was next in line to pay. She put the sweatshirt on the counter and picked up a fake declaration and handed it to the cashier.

"You'll have to put the other one on the counter too." The clerk said, she pointed to Ben's jacket; the real Declaration was poking out of his jacket.

Ben and Lydia shared a horrified look and Ben got the real Declaration out of his coat pocket.

"Of course." Ben set it on the counter and glanced at Lydia, his eyes asking her if she had the money to pay for it. Lydia shrugged; she hoped she did; they couldn't afford a credit card slip.

"That will be $90 even." The clerk said once she was done scanning the fake Declaration twice.

"How much?" Lydia asked in surprise. She knew it was going to cost a lot, but ninety dollars sounded like too much.

"Including taxes it's $73.50 for both Declarations and 16.50 for the sweatshirt." The cashier said. "Each Declaration is $36.75 alone."

"Okay," Lydia said. She pulled out her money putting her wallet on the counter. Looking through it she realized that she only had 82 dollars. She looked up and noticed a sign, 10% off with student ID.

"Here's my student ID for the discount, and 81 dollars." Lydia said, handing the cashier the cash and her student ID.

After getting her ID Back, Lydia put it back into her purse and quickly left. Neither Ben nor Lydia saw the cashier writing down Lydia's name on a piece of a discarded receipt.

They left through a side exit and were walking towards the van when they both heard Riley singing off key, "Where are you, Ben?"

"Stop talking and start the van." Ben ordered. He handed Lydia the real Declaration and pointed to the back of the van. "Get in," Lydia hurried to the van, sliding the back open and climbing in. She slid the Declaration into the tube that Ben had purchased earlier in the week. It would protect the document and make it easy to carry.

"Ben, the uhhh...the mean Declaration lady's behind you." Riley said.

"Crap!" Lydia said. They couldn't afford to be held up, for all they knew someone had already noticed that the Declaration was gone.

"Hey." Lydia could faintly hear the woman.

"Oh, it's you. Hello." Ben responded.

"Mr. Brown, what's going on?" Even through the van doors she could hear the annoyance in the woman's voice. "What's that?"

"It's a souvenir." Lydia shook her head as Ben spoke. It was obvious her dad was still on edge and it sounded like he was lying.

"Really?"

"Stop chatting and get in the van." Riley said through gritted teeth.

"Did you enjoy the party?" Just as Ben asked Dr. Chase there was a loud noise from the National Archives building.

"Oh No!" Lydia moaned as she realized what it was: an alarm. Somebody had realized that the Declaration was missing!

"Oh, my God." Evidently Dr. Chase had realized this same thing and was starting to yell. "Oh, my God! You did not...!"

"Lydia buckle up, we're going to be peeling out of here once your dad gets in." Riley said to her. Lydia crawled over the front seat and was sitting down when she heard her dad.

"It's yours. Take it." He suddenly climbed onto the vehicle and sat down in the seat in back.

Dr. Chase was crossing the street now, still yelling, "Security! Over here! Security!"

"We can't just let her go!" Riley snapped, "She's seen us!"

"We can…" Ben started but Lydia interrupted him.

"We can't kidnap her!" Lydia objected to Riley's protest.

"Wait. No, hold it." Ben stopped Riley from driving off. He was looking across the street. Ian was in a catering truck and a few of his henchmen had gotten out and were talking to Dr. Chase.

"Oh, bad. Bad, bad, bad!" Ben said, just as Ian's henchmen grabbed Dr. Chase and pulled her into the catering van.

"No! No!" Lydia didn't even realize she was screaming. Ben got out of the van and was going around the front when there was gunfire.

"Lydia, get down!" Ben yelled, Lydia bent forward, covering her neck and head with her arms. She could feel the bullets strike the car and only hoped that they hadn't hit anybody.

The gunfire stopped and Ben got back into the van, "Go! Go!" he ordered Riley. The man stepped on the gas and followed the catering van.

"Once we catch them what do we do?" Riley voiced what Lydia was thinking

"I'm working on it." Ben said, leaning forward between the two front seats.

The catering truck made a sharp right turn; the driver obviously hoped that they could lose the van.

Riley made the turn, with Lydia and Ben holding on for dear life.

"Ahh!" Lydia screamed as Riley had to make another sharp turn around a corner to avoid getting hit by a bus.

The catering van was still in front of them and it was headed straight for a construction site. The three of them bounced up and down as the van drove over the uneven ground.

They finally got onto asphalt and Riley jerked the wheel, attempting to stop the skidding.

Just as Lydia looked up, the back door to the catering truck opened and Dr. Chase came out, swinging on the open door, document still in hand. Lydia felt a wave of panic wash over her; she was going to watch someone die. If Dr. Chase fell there was no way the van could avoid hitting her.

"Holy Lord!" she heard Riley say just before gunfire broke out again. Instinctively Lydia bent over, covering her neck and head with her arms again; she felt one of her dad's hands on her back, forcing her to stay down.

Ben's hand left her back and Lydia cocked her head to one side, listening. She didn't hear gunfire.

"Get me next to her." Ben had opened the sliding passenger door and was leaning out. Riley followed Ben's instructions and they were soon in the next lane, catching up to the catering van.

"What? Dad! No!"

There was a honk and Lydia looked up to find that a city bus was heading towards them. She screwed her eyes shut and stiffened; waiting for the crash, but it didn't come. She slowly opened one eye. The bus was going by on the other side of them, Lydia's eyes popped open all the way as she realized that her Dad had been leaning out into the street.

"Dad!" she screamed, trying to turn around as best as the seat belt allowed. It kept stopping her, using the child lock feature. When she tried turning around again, she saw the catering truck back doors wing closed and then open again in a matter of seconds. This time Dr. Chase didn't have the Declaration with her.

"Abigail!" Lydia could hear her dad yelling. There were a couple of shots and Lydia instantly bent down, knowing what her dad's order would be.

Suddenly, the gunshots stopped and there were a couple of thuds as Ben and Dr. Chase fell back into the van. After seeing that they were both in the van, Riley pulled off onto a side street and slowed the van down.

"Are you all right?" Ben asked, getting up. Lydia had turned around and interrupted any response that Dr. Chase could have made.

"Dad, are you all right?"

"I'm fine, Lydia." Ben promised.

"Those lunatics..." Dr Chase started, Ben turned back to her.

"You're not hurt, are you?" he asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

"You are all lunatics!" Dr. Chase said Lydia leaned back a little _well for rude_, she though _we just saved you from death and you're calling us lunatics?_

"Are you hungry?" Ben asked. Lydia looked up at her Dad in confusion. _What_?

"What?" The off-the-wall question caught Dr. Chase off guard as well and it gave Ben a chance to repeat himself.

"Are you all right?" He seemed a little annoyed that he'd had to ask her the same question multiple times.

"Still a little on edge from being shot at, but I'll be OK. Thanks for asking." Riley put in. Lydia couldn't help but laugh, after the tense situation they had just gotten out of; laughing felt good.

"Yeah, well, I'm not all right. Those men have the Declaration of Independence!" Dr. Chase was still shouting.

"She lost it?" Riley obviously thought that Dr. Chase had had the real Declaration.

"They don't have it." Ben said, he pulled the tube out and showed Dr. Chase the real Declaration. He put it away and handed the entire tube to Lydia who set it on the ground in front of her, wrapping one leg around it to keep it standing.

"See? OK? Now could you please stop shouting?" Ben asked.

"Give me that!" Dr Chase demanded, turning to Lydia.

"You're still shouting. And it's really starting to annoy." Ben said "You'd do well, Dr Chase, to be a bit more civilized in this instance."

"If this is the real one, which one did they get?" she asked. Although Dr. Chase seemed to be trying to calm down her voice was still several decibels louder than a regular speaking voice..

"A souvenir. I made Lydia get in and put the real one away first." Ben told Riley. "And, you know what?" He turned to Dr. Chase again. "Lydia actually had to pay for the souvenir and the real one, so you owe her $35 plus tax."

"Including tax she owes me $36.75." Lydia spoke up from the front seat.

"Who were those men?" Dr. Chase asked, frustrated.

"Just the guys we warned you were gonna steal the Declaration." Ben told her.

"And you didn't believe us." Riley spoke from the driver's seat.

"We did the only thing we could do to keep it safe." Ben continued talking.

"You should be thanking us." Lydia chimed in.

"Verdammt! Give me that!" Dr. Chase said, leaning forward and reaching for the Declaration. Lydia held it out of the woman's reach and Ben made her sit back down.

"You know something? You're shouting again." Ben informed the woman.

"I'm pretty sure she was swearing, too." Riley put in as he took the van around a turn.

"Well, we probably deserve that." Ben shrugged.

"What are we going to do with her when we're trying to figure out what's on the back of the Declaration?" Lydia asked.

"There is not a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence." Dr. Chase interrupted before Ben or Riley could say anything.

"And there's no chance anyone can steal this either." Lydia shot back, holding up the tube that held the Declaration.

"We leveled with you 100%. Everything we told you was the truth." Ben said flatly.

"I want that document, Mr. Brown." Lydia had to hand it to the Dr. Chase, she didn't give up easily.

"OK," Ben apparently thought that now was the best time to play a game of 'let's be honest'. "My name's not Brown. It's Gates. We leveled with you 98%."

"Wait a minute; did you just say "Gates?" Riley and Lydia nodded in turn as Dr. Chase looked back and forth; apparently hoping one of them would contradict Ben's statement. "Gates?"

"Yes, we're both Gates." Lydia said.

"You're that family with the conspiracy theory about the Founding Fathers?" Dr. Chase had obviously heard of them.

"It's not a conspiracy theory!" Lydia and Ben spoke as one.

"Per se." Riley muttered from his seat.

"You know what? I take it back." Dr. Chase started to laugh a little "You're not liars. You're insane."

"Well there's one way to find out." Ben said.

"How?" Dr. Chase asked warily.

"We'll do a couple of tests on it; we've got the supplies we need."

Dr. Chase was staring at the Ben, Lydia and Riley in shock. "You can't seriously intend to run chemical tests on the Declaration of Independence in the back of a moving van."

"We aren't," Lydia spoke up from her seat, "We're going back to our place."

"We have a clean-room environment all set up. EDS suits, a particulate air filtration system, the whole shebang." Riley rattled off the measures they had taken to make sure that the Declaration wasn't harmed while they ran tests on it.

"Really?" Dr. Chase actually seemed impressed as she looked between Ben and Lydia to check with what Riley had told her.

"We can't go back there." Ben said, shaking his head.

"What? Why not?" Lydia and Riley spoke in unison.

**_

* * *

_**"Here they are." Peter Sadusky was in the security center for the Archives. They were looking at the video tapes of the gift shop. One of the FBI agents stopped the tape and zoomed in on Ben and Lydia paying for the Declarations.

"The man, Dr Herbert said Dr Chase introduced him as Mr. Brown." He tapped a button to make the camera's stop and zoom in on Ben. "Not on the guest list and he was seen in the gift shop with the girl; she seemed to be his daughter."

"Now, the gift-store clerk - she said the girl was really tense. She came into the gift shop once, asked about the price of the Declarations and then walked right back out again. When she came back in she didn't even go over to the fake Declarations that were on sale; she went over to the Rosie the Riveter sweatshirts and started talking. She kept saying weird stuff. And when "Mr. Brown" walked in, she actually started crying. The store clerk got down her information when the girl used her student ID to get a discount in the store." The agent poked a button and the camera's turned to Lydia. "The girl is Lydia Gates; she's 16 and goes to Alexandria High, its 20 minutes away, so it's right over the state boarder. We got into the school database; her father's name is Benjamin Gates."

Peter leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen, "So…" he asked thoughtfully. "Why did Lydia start crying when Ben walked in? Is he forcing her to help him with this?"

_

* * *

__Please review!_


	6. Chapter 6

**I edited this chapter and I'm re-posting it1 thank you to all who have reviewed!**

**Chapter 6:**

"An ID slip?" Riley asked, looking between Ben and Lydia.

"Dad, we used cash…" Lydia started.

"You gave her your information for the discount," Ben interrupted. "She saw your school ID."

Lydia slumped down in her chair leaning her head back as she realized what had happened, "I'm sorry Dad, I didn't know that would get us into trouble, I wouldn't have even gotten the sweatshirt if I knew…" she started.

"It's okay Lydia," Ben said, he placed a hand against her cheek. "It's not your fault. I should have thought to get the price for the Declaration first to make sure we had enough cash, besides, we didn't plan on buying both."

"What do we do?" Lydia asked quietly.

Ben shrugged. "We need those letters."

"What letters?" Dr. Chase asked.

Lydia gave a start, she'd forgotten that Dr. Chase was in the van with them, but then Lydia's eyebrow's shot up in surprise as she realized what Ben had said. "I thought you put them out here Dad," she said. "I noticed they were missing when Riley and I were at the apartment."

"What do you mean?" Ben asked looking concerned "I left the letters at the apartment."

"What letters?" Dr. Chase asked again, obviously the woman didn't like being ignored.

"I was grabbing my Sudoku book off the table where I left it this morning." Lydia thought back to when she'd noticed that the letters were missing. "And I noticed that the letters were gone, I figured that you had grabbed them and stuck them in here in case we couldn't go back to the apartment."

"I didn't. Or, at least I don't _remember_ doing it." Ben said. He turned to the bag he'd brought in to the van that morning. After rifling through it he looked up at Lydia. "They aren't in here," he said.

"Dad, they're just letters, besides we've got the originals at Grandpa's," Lydia said, trying to comfort her Dad.

"You know what?" Ben said, he turned to Riley and kept talking. "Riley, get off the road, take a right."

"What letters!" Dr. Chase snapped, getting both Lydia and Ben's attention.

"We'll explain once we get parked," Ben promised as Riley started driving past a park. "Park here," Ben instructed.

Twenty minutes later they had parked and unloaded about half the van in search of the letters. After not finding them, they finally explained to Dr. Chase what they were talking about. Lydia was sitting in the front passenger seat, with Riley leaning up against the front end of the van. Dr. Chase was sitting with her feet dangling out the passenger sliding door; Ben was pacing a few yards in front of the van holding the Declaration case in one hand.

"You have the original Silence Dogood letters? Did you steal those, too?"

"We have scans of the originals. Quiet, please." Ben was clearly losing patience with the woman.

"How'd you get scans?" Dr. Chase asked, actually sounding a little impressed.

"I know the person who has the originals. Now shush." Lydia knew Ben's tone of voice well; it was always the one she heard right before she got into trouble.

"Why do you need them?"

Ben sighed heavily, and turned to Dr. Chase. "I'll tell you what, look. I will let you hold onto this if you'll promise to shut up, please." Ben handed the woman the declaration tubes. "Thank you!"

"Dad," Lydia started, but she stopped talking when she saw Ben's look, he was in no mood to be corrected. So Lydia got out of the van, closing her door behind her and leaning up against it so she could see Dr. Chase better, she had a feeling that the woman would try and run off with the document.

"Ben," Riley said from his spot a few feet from Lydia. "You know what you have to do."

"I know _what_ to do. I'm just trying to think of anything else we could do," Ben snapped.

"Well, not to be a... nudge," Riley said, "But you do realize how many people we have after us, right? We probably have our own satellite by now."

"He's right Dad." Lydia nodded, taking her eyes off of Dr. Chase for a moment to look at her Dad as she spoke. "I'm actually surprised we haven't run into anyone yet."

"It took you all of two seconds to decide to steal the Declaration of Independence, Ben."

"Yeah, but I didn't think I was gonna _personally_," Ben stressed the last word, "have to tell my dad about it."

Just then Dr. Chase made a run for it, the action actually caught Lydia by surprise; she'd gotten distracted from watching after the woman.

"Hey, not cool! Not cool!" Ben chased after the woman, both Riley and Lydia started to run after her as well but Ben was the one who caught her. The two of them wrestled for a moment and Lydia could hear the woman yelling.

"Let me go!"

Ben managed to get the declaration case and then let go of Dr. Chase, pushing her away gently. "OK. You're let go. Go, shoo."

"I'm not going. Not without the Declaration."

"You're not going with the Declaration," Ben retorted.

"Yes, I am. I'm not letting it out of my sight, so I'm going."

"Wait," Ben said, "You're not going with us, with the Declaration." Lydia's eyes widened, Dr. Chase wasn't saying that she wanted to go with them, was she?

"Yes, I am," Dr. Chase said, grabbing the strap to the declaration case.

"No, you're not." Ben jerked back again, trying to get everything out of the woman's reach.

"Look," Dr. Chase's voice got quieter and Lydia had to strain to hear her. "If you wanted to leave me behind, you shouldn't have told me where you were going."

"Crap." Lydia and Riley spoke as one.

Page Break

Agent Peter Sadusky followed a SWAT team and a handful of his agent's into the Gates' apartment. It was time he learned who the Gates' were.

"Whoa," he muttered when he saw the plastic sheeting up. There were chemicals and papers behind the sheeting but Sadusky couldn't find any papers that the chemicals could be used for, apparently the Gates' hadn't left anything out in plain sight. After directing a couple of his agents to go through everything and make sure they documented everything, he turned his attention to the agents that had gone to the back of the apartment.

"There's a bathroom in the back and two bedrooms," one agent told him, "One is a man's, the other one looks like a girl's." Agent Sadusky walked through the apartment, pictures lined the walls, mostly of Lydia and Ben, Lydia was in a costume in some of them, another couple she was in a dress, there was one in a graduation robe; it looked a few years old and Peter surmised that it was her 8th Grade graduation. There were a few with an older woman or an older man in them. One wooden frame had the words Grandma and Me burned onto it.

He passed a couple of doors; there was a small table outside one of them. There were a few rolls of toilet paper on it with some hair ties lying beside them.

He saw a door with a Lord of the Rings poster on the front of it, the door swung inwards and he stepped into a girls' room. From the light in the hall, he could see there were posters all along one wall; X-Men; Finding Nemo, and a close up picture of the man who played Wolverine from X-Men. He turned a switch and a light came on, he could see that the walls were an off white, with purple curtains on the window. Right above the desk, there was a University of Maryland in Baltimore County pendent and on the desk there was a pile of textbooks and a few brochures. Peter took a closer look at the brochures; they were for University of Pennsylvania, George Washington University and the University of Maryland in Baltimore County. (These are all actual Universities)

There were sticky notes on all of them and Peter read them to himself, the sticky note on University of Maryland said _NANA!_ and _Partial Scholarship_. The note on University of Pennsylvania said _Full scholarship_. The last sticky note confused Peter, it was on George Washington University and it said _A miracle_. After looking at the sticky notes for a moment he realized that it was how Lydia planned to pay for school.

The other side of the desk had a pile of text books. He noticed that a few of them were from Lydia's school; there was some sort of school seal on one. Apparently Lydia attended a private school. Peter opened the desk drawers and quickly glanced through them. Her school schedule was on top in one drawer; Peter took it out and looked at it. She had seven classes, 4 of which were either honors or Advance Placement classes; he noticed there was a religious class, _Finding Jesus in Everyday_. "She goes to a private religious school," Peter murmured, "But…" Peter made a quick sweep of the room with his eyes. "There are no religious materials in plain sight." He stuck his head out of the room, "Could somebody look for receipts for tuition at Lydia's school? It's a private school called Bishop Ireton. Look for religious materials as well."

A moment later Agent Hendricks called back, "There are several tuition receipts, one is for 10,000 a year but that was when Lydia was in the fifth grade. Grades six through eight were 15,000, she is in 11th grade now and tuition is 20,000 a year."

"What about religious materials?" Peter asked again.

"I can't find any," one of his agents spoke up.

"You're not religious yet you go to a religious private school," Peter murmured to himself, "How does your father pay the tuition?"

He came back into the room and turned to the bed. The purple bedspread was across the entire bed but it was wrinkled and uneven. There was a cork board on the wall above the bed with several ribbons on it, Peter saw that some were from her early school years; apparently Lydia had won the spelling bee in third grade. She had been the best helper for the younger children in homework club when she was in the 4th grade. A report card was tacked to the board as well, he leaned in and saw that it was her 10th grade report card, she had aced almost every class but in several classes her teachers had made comments. _Corrects me too much_, her History teacher had written in pen; _has problems paying attention_ her English teacher had put. Her Math teacher had something nice to say: _quiet; always turns work in on time_.

There was a calendar tacked to the wall next to the cork board and Peter saw that Lydia had several tests coming up; in fact, there was a history test on Monday and a babysitting job for the Carlton's the next Friday. There was a highlighter arrow through several weeks and Peter noticed that Lydia had written Nana in Mexico and then drawn an arrow through several weeks; apparently the Grandmother wasn't supposed to get home until right before Thanksgiving.

The bookshelves across from the bed were tightly filled with books, Harry Potter, Charlottes' Web, The Giver, Mr. Poppers Penguins, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Rings were only a few of them. There was an entire bookshelf devoted to books about France, and half of another shelf was filled with books written in French.

There was a bedside table on one side of the bed with a lamp that had a white fuzzy shade, there were a few books on it as well; Peter picked them up to look at them. One was small and blue with gold-colored lines in a harpsichord design. He flipped it so that he could see the title Longfellow Poems, it read, Cabinet Edition. He opened it up and read the copyright dates they dated from 1841 all the way to 1891. He closed it and set it down on the bedside table again. The second book was red and entitled: Reader's Digest Great Biographies Charles A. Lindbergh, Florence Nightingale. Thomas A Edison, Hans Christian Andersen. He set that down and noticed the third book, a small green one had a bookmark part way through it; he opened it up to see what Lydia had been reading. The True Grandeur of Nations by Charles Sumner the top of the page read Peter closed the book and set it back down.

He turned and noticed the closet door was partly open. A bathrobe hung off of one corner, it looked about ready to fall off. Agent Sadusky peeked in the closet without opening it, the hangers were empty for the most part. He opened the door to get a better view of the contents of the closet, the bathrobe fell off and pooled at his feet. There were only three shirts and a single pair of jeans in the closet. _Did they pack up and leave?_ He wondered as he looked deeper inside the closet. He got an answer to his question, there was a laundry hamper that was filled with dirty clothes; it was over flowing and there was a pile of socks on the floor with a bath towel crumpled up beside them.

Peter was about to leave the room when he noticed a picture on the dresser, the frame was made out of Popsicle sticks, macaroni and glue. It wasn't the frame that caught his eye; it was the picture in it. Lydia looked about four or five and she was hugging a woman with blonde hair and green eyes, they were both grinning at the camera.

He stepped closer to the picture frame and picked it up; _Me and Mommy_ was written on the bottom of the frame in a childish scrawl, there hadn't been enough room on the bottom of the frame to finished the word mommy so Lydia had written _Mom_ on the bottom of the frame and the _my_ right above it.

He turned to frame around, the words _Molly and Lydia, August 1993_ were written at the bottom. He could see now that the photo was taped onto the back of the frame, from the looks of it; it had been taken off and taped back on several times. It was a man's writing and Peter surmised that Benjamin had been the one taking the picture.

"Is the mother's name Molly?" he wondered, he gently took the picture off of the frame and stuck it into his pocket. After putting the picture frame back on the shelf, he left closing the door behind him.

"Look for divorce papers or a death certificate," Peter said. "I found a picture of a mother in the girl's room but there's no mention of her out here."

"I just found them," Agent Hendricks said, "Looks like Molly Prewet and Benjamin Gates were married in June 1988 and the final divorce paper was signed May of 1995. Molly signed over full custody to Ben at the final signing."

"Has anybody found anything on the girl?" Peter asked.

"She's on her period," Agent Dawes said, stepping out of the bathroom. Peter fought to keep himself from rolling his eyes but then realized that it was important. "Check to see if they have anything for..." he paused trying to think of a polite way to put the end of his request.

"I haven't found pads or tampons." Agent Dawes figured out what Agent Sadusky wanted.

"I didn't see any in her room, there's a chance they'd have to stop somewhere to get some," Peter said.

"I've got some info on Gates, the male one." Agent Johnson spoke from the couch. "A degree in American History from Georgetown, a degree in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, Navy ROTC and Naval Diving and Salvage Training Centre."

"What in the world did this guy want to be when he grew up?" Peter asked himself; it was rhetorical but Agent Hendricks shrugged in response.

"Let's keep our focus on Gates, run him to ground," Peter said going into the living room to sit on a chair. "Compile a family and friends list, closest relative first."

"Both his parents are still alive," Agent Hendricks offered, now he was looking through a purple address book. "There's an address for an Emily Appleton/Nana in Baltimore and a Patrick Gates/Grandpa in Philadelphia."

"Baltimore's closest," Peter said, "But I think the grandmother is in Mexico, the girl had something about it on her calendar."

Agent Hendricks called a number and waited to be put though, "I'm calling her work number that should probably tell us."

There was a few minutes of silence during which, Peter found a lock box, after picking the flimsy lock he realized he'd found some papers about Lydia. There was a Birth Certificate, citing her birthday as November 15th, 1988. She had started Kindergarten in September of 1994 but had been pushed ahead to first grade in November of the same year. She did very well in school, as she was taking mostly college prep courses or Advance Placement courses. However, there were some notes in her file that said that Lydia had been correcting her teacher in History. She had just started her junior year and was supposed to graduate in June 2006.

"The Grandma is in Mexico," Agent Hendricks said, he closed his phone, "she said so on her answering machine at work."

"Let's figure out where the Grandfather lives," Peter said, "There's a good chance they'll need his help."

Three hours later the group of four had finally gotten out of Washington DC and into Philadelphia. "Turn right at Lakeview," Ben instructed Riley.

As Riley made the turn Ben leaned forward to talk to Lydia. "Lydia, I hate to ask you to do this, but you know that whenever you smile at Grandpa a certain way he always gives you what you want?"

"Yeah," Lydia said, "That mostly worked when I was a kid though."

"Do you think that you could do that tonight?"

"I'll try, but I can't promise anything," she admitted.

"It's the house on the corner," Ben suddenly said to Riley.

"The white one," Lydia chimed in, after Riley had seen the house, she bent and got her hair brush out of the backpack at her feet. She quickly pulled the brush through her hair and tucked her hair behind her ears.

"How long do you think we have?" Lydia asked quietly.

"Let's hope we have a couple of hours, at least," Ben said, "Riley; please park a few blocks away."

Riley nodded and drove past the house.

"What are we going to do about her?" Lydia asked, jerking her head in Dr. Chase's direction. "I think Riley has some duct tape in the back."

Dr. Chase's eyes widened and she looked at Ben in alarm.

"Lydia, not cool," Ben said shortly, he turned to Dr. Chase, "Promise you won't be any trouble?" he asked.

"I promise," Dr. Chase said, clearly, she did not like being treated like a 16 year old.

Lydia turned back to her backpack as she tried to stuff it under the front seat, it had been sitting on her foot the entire ride and she was tired of having it in the way. Riley parked and Lydia simply gave up.

Riley parked and they all got out they crossed the street, heading towards Patrick's house. A car passed and all four of them ducked behind parked cars or, in Riley's case; a tree. Lydia and Dr. Chase both ducked behind the same car and as Lydia squatted in the gutter, Dr. Chase touched Lydia's arm. "Look, Lydia we got off on the wrong foot," she began, obviously trying to be nice.

_No kidding_. Lydia thought. "Yeah, sort of," she politely agreed.

"I'd like to…" Dr. Chase began; Ben who had ducked behind the car next to them stood up and checked to see if the car had passed them.

"Let's go," Ben said. He motioned for the three other members of the group to stand up. Lydia and Dr. Chase stood up and started walking.

"Look," Lydia lowered her voice, "I'm not trying to be rude Dr. Chase, but I don't really want to be friends right now, all I really want to do is clear our names and convince my dad to let me graduate from High school a year early."

"Lydia, do you remember if you still have some clothes at Grandpa's?" Ben asked, not realizing that Lydia and Dr. Chase were talking. "In the spare room?"

"I think so." Lydia said catching up with her father, "But Dad I already have clothes in the van, I packed the duffle bag just like you asked me to."

Ben quietly nodded his head in Dr. Chase' direction. "She looks about your size," he said quietly.

Lydia looked at the older woman. "She's at least four inches taller than I am Dad," Lydia said, "But I'll get some clothes though and we can see if they fit her." Lydia was trying not to be argumentative; she knew she'd get into trouble for it.

They reached Patrick's house and Ben knocked then glanced at Lydia and mouthed, "Smile."

Lydia nodded and smiled as the door opened. "Hi Grandpa!" Lydia said happily, she stepped forward and hugged her grandpa; "I missed you," she said, stretching the truth, just a little.

Her grandfather hugged her back but looked to Ben. "Where's the party?" he asked.

"Well... I'm in a little trouble," Ben said.

"Is she pregnant?"

Lydia's eyes bugged out in surprise. "Grandpa!" she gasped, not knowing if her Grandpa was talking about her or Dr. Chase.

"No, Dad," Ben said, affronted "Abigail is not pregnant."

Patrick nodded but then he noticed Riley, hesitated and then pointed to him his face darkening, "Did this hooligan get Lydia pregnant?" he asked.

Lydia couldn't help it; she burst out laughing. "Sorry Riley," she apologized, "I'm not trying to be mean."

"Sure you're not," Riley muttered.

"I'm really not." Lydia giggled; she managed to stop laughing as the group entered the house.

"How could you think Dr. Chase was pregnant?" Ben asked Patrick; Patrick's eyes flitted to Lydia before he mumbled, "It wouldn't be the first time."

"Yeah Grandpa, I'm right here," Lydia said, she turned to the group. "I am going up to change, I'm sick of this dress and I know I've got shoes upstairs that fit."

She went up the stairs just as her Grandfather said to her dad, "this better not be about that dumb treasure."

Lydia was suddenly glad that she always kept a spare change of clothes here, she didn't want to be around when her Grandpa found out what they needed.

She quickly went to the guest bedroom and changed from her skirt and top to the jeans that were there. She found a pair of socks and, after putting them on, she put on a pair of old tennis shoes she'd stashed in the upstairs closet. She changed into a T-shirt and then did her hair, after braiding it all into pigtails she tied them off with the hair ties she'd found in her jeans.

She looked around the room again, looking for a duffle bag or a backpack, after not finding one; she grabbed a pillow case and stuffed some clothes into it. She grabbed a couple of pairs of jeans and some T-Shirts she grabbed her extra pair of shoes and stuck them inside the bag.

As she went down the stairs, she found the entire group still in the living room, Ben and Patrick were fighting.

"Maybe that's the real Gates family legacy; son's who disappoint their fathers," Ben snapped.

There was a pause, and the sound of both Ben and Patrick's heavy breathing. "Get out; take your troubles with you," her grandfather said.

There was another pause as Ben turned in frustration, he noticed Lydia on the stairs and their eyes locked for a moment. Ben turned around to face his father again. "I found The Charlotte." Ben finally said, emphasizing the last two words, which caught Patrick's attention.

"The Charlotte, you mean she was a ship?" Patrick asked.

"She was beautiful," Ben said, he smiled at the memory. "It was amazing."

"And the treasure?"

"No," Ben said hesitantly, he knew his Father would not like the answer he had to give. "No. But we found another clue that led us here..." He added quickly.

"Yeah, and that'll lead you to another clue!" Patrick interrupted. "And that's all you'll ever find, is another clue. Don't you get it, Ben? I finally figured it out. The legend says that the treasure was buried to keep it from the British. But what really happened was the legend was invented, to keep the British occupied searching for buried treasure. The treasure is a myth."

"I refuse to believe that," Ben said, the tone of his voice was firm, the same one he had used when refusing to let Ian steal the Declaration.

"Well, you can believe what you want. You're a grown person. What am I doing? Do what you want, Ben. Do what you want." Patrick threw his hands up and stalked around the living room, picking some things up, Lydia walked down the last few stairs and into the living room, she leaned up against the door jam as Dr. Chase spoke

"He's probably right. You don't even know if there is another clue." The tone of her voice surprised Lydia a little. Less than a week before she had teased them when they brought up the possibility of there being a map on the back of the Declaration. Now she sounded a little disappointed about the possibility of it not being there.

"Well, Ben's voice had a note of finality in it."I can think of a way we could find. And we can find out right now."

Please review!


	7. Chapter 7

**Wow, I actually got two chapters out in almost as many weeks! I feel like I've accomplished something :)**

**I also have a couple of chapters about ready to be edited right now, thank you to Sparky Dorian, my new beta, she's great. :)**

**Oh, if you watch Criminal Minds, there's a guest appearance by one of my favorite characters. This won't become a crossover though, I think this is the only chapter I'll be borrowing her.**

**_Chapter 7: _**

Peter Sadusky opened his cell phone and quickly dialed the number for the tech girl in the BAU unit; Sadusky's tech woman had gone on Maternity leave and wouldn't be back until after the Christmas holiday.

"Penelope Garcia, speak if you wish to learn," a perky voice answered after a single ring.

"Garcia, its Sadusky," Peter said, this tech girl was supposed to know that Sadusky and his team would need her help until his team got their tech girl back.

"Hello sir, how can I help you?" Penelope sounded a little horrified at how she had answered the phone.

"Can you look up somebody for me?"

"Sure, who?"

"The name is Molly Prewet, however, Prewet is her maiden name; she might have changed it by now."

There was the sound of typing on the other end of the line. "I'm going to need more than that; I've got 116 of her," Garcia said.

"We know she lived in Virginia from 1988 to 1994, it's possible she moved in 1995, we're not sure where. She was married to Benjamin Gates. The divorce was final in May of '95."

"I've got her, she still goes by Prewet;" there was some typing and Garcia spoke again. "She moved several times, mostly around the DC area until 1999, she now lives in Portland Oregon, with her little boy Brandon, from his birth record, he'll turn seven in January."

"All right, can you send me the info on her?" Peter asked.

"I'm sending it to Agent Dawes' phone right now," Garcia said, just before Agent Dawes' phone beeped as an incoming file came in.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome Sadusky," Penelope said, they hung up and Peter turned to Agent Dawes.

"Do you have Molly's phone number?" Peter asked.

"Yes and her address," Dawes said.

Peter glanced at the clock, it was nearly midnight their time, but Portland Oregon was three hours earlier, meaning it wasn't even nine o'clock Pacific time.

He flipped his phone open again and dialed the number Dawes read off. It rang once, twice and was finally picked up in the middle of the third ring.

"Hello?" It was a boy who picked up.

"Hello, is your Mommy home?" Peter asked.

"Yeah, who's this?" the boy asked.

"My name is Peter Sadusky, I'm with the FBI," Peter said.

"Are you like a police officer?" the boy asked.

"A little bit, I work for the President."

"Cool." The little boy sounded impressed. "Mommy, a policeman for the President's on the phone!" Peter heard the phone being handed to someone else and a female voice said faintly.

"Brandon, go to bed, I'll tuck you in when I'm done on the phone." The voice came closer as the woman asked, "Hello, who is this?" The voice sounded confused

"Am I speaking with Molly Prewet?"

"Yes, this is she." The woman voice was now guarded.

My name is Peter Sadusky, I'm with the FBI; it's about Lydia Gates."

"Oh dear God, what happened?"

Peter paused it was probably best that the entire conversation was held face-to-face; "I think it would be best for you to hear the entire story when you're in Washington DC," Peter started to say.

"Is this about the treasure?" Molly asked; sounding very weary.

"What treasure?" Peter asked this was the first time he'd heard anything about any treasure.

There was a deep sigh on the other end of the line. "It's hard to explain but I think it should be done in person."

"That would be helpful; my office is in Washington DC. Dulles International is the closest airport."

"All right, I'll be out there within 24 hours. However; I may need to bring my son."

"That's all right," Peter said. "Here's a number that you can call me at if you need to." He listed his phone number and both he and Molly hung up.

"Is she flying out?" Dawes asked.

"Yes."

"What are you going to tell her? That Lydia is wanted by the FBI?"

"From the information I've gotten, there's a chance that Lydia's being forced to do this. Her father may not be giving her a choice. I'm hoping to have separated Lydia and Ben by the time Molly gets out here."

* * *

Meanwhile in Philadelphia, Riley, Ben Dr. Chase and Lydia had the declaration spread out on the dining room table ready to find the treasure map.

"It looks like animal skin," Patrick said from the hallway. "How old is it?"

There was an awkward pause before Ben spoke. "About 200 years."

"You sure?" Patrick asked, he seemed surprised at how old the document was.

"Pretty darn," Ben said. "Dad, it's really late, why don't you get some rest?" Lydia's father was obviously trying to get rid of the older man.

"I'm fine," Patrick said, he went into the kitchen and threw a few things away in the trash, peeking into the dining room from the kitchen.

"Now if this thing's in invisible ink, how do we look at it?" Riley asked.

"Throw it in the oven," Patrick suggested.

"No!" All four of them said at the same time.

Patrick seemed surprised at the outburst but he kept talking. "Ferrous sulphate inks can only be brought out with heat."

"Yes, but this..." Dr. Chase started

"It's very old," Ben interrupted. Dr. Chase looked surprised and actually a little insulted.

"I wouldn't have said what it was," She muttered in French.

"You speak French?" Lydia asked Dr. Chase in French.

"Yes I do, where did you learn?" Dr. Chase asked.

"School," Lydia said, "I've only been learning for two years, I wanted to learn what Ms. Williams was saying about me behind my back." Lydia spoke of her school's secretary.

"You speak French quite well," Dr. Chase said, sounding impressed.

"Thank you" Lydia said, "Madame Josephine says I'm one of the quickest learners she's ever taught." She glanced at her father to see that he had a lemon slice in one hand and was poised over the document. Dr. Chase looked to see what had caught Lydia's attention and her eyes widened noticeably when she saw what Ben was preparing to do.

"Dad what are you doing?" Lydia asked as Dr. Chase spoke

"You can't do that!" Dr. Chase said, grabbing Ben's wrist to stop him from squirting the declaration.

"But it has to be done."

"Then someone who is trained to handle antique documents is gonna do it," Dr. Chase said firmly.

"Okay."

Dr. Chase took the lemon slice from Ben's hand got some juice on a Q-tip "Now, if there is a secret message, it'll probably be marked by a symbol in the upper right-hand corner."

"That's right." Ben seemed a little impressed, Lydia wasn't. Yes, Dr. Chase was smart for not just squirting the document but still, even Lydia knew that.

Dr. Chase paused as she realized something. "I am so getting fired for this," she said, bending to the document.

Honey, you passed that point a long time ago. Lydia couldn't help but think.

The group of four leaned into the Declaration and they all held a collective breath. Nothing happened and they all let out a breath of disappointment.

"I told you. You need heat." Patrick was peeking in from the kitchen again.

Ben and Dr. Chase looked at each other for a moment before leaning down to the document they both breathed on it. Lydia and Riley leaned in to see if anything happened.

To Lydia's amazement there was writing on the declaration! Lydia felt a thrill shoot through her. This is awesome, she thought, grinning.

"We need more juice." Ben grinned

"We need more heat," Dr. Chase said, grinning back.

It took nearly twenty minutes but Dr. Chase got the lemon juice on the declaration and turned on Lydia's hair dryer and was warming the document; making the writing appear, Ben was writing it all down on a legal pad.

"That's not a map," Riley realized, just as Lydia realized the same thing. "Is it?" he asked.

"More clues, what a surprise," Patrick said from the hallway. They ignored him.

"Are those latitudes and longitudes?" Riley asked.

"These are why we need the Silence Dogood letters," Ben said.

"That's the key?" Dr. Chase asked, turning the hair dryer off.

"Yeah. 'The key in Silence undetected,' " Ben repeated some of the clue off. "Dad, can we have the letters now?"

"Will somebody please explain to me what these magic numbers are?" Riley said, clearly annoyed that he didn't know what was going on.

"Yeah, I'm curious too," Lydia said.

"It's an Ottendorf cipher." Dr. Chase said, she put the hair dryer down and leaned in close to the Declaration.

"That's right," Patrick said,

"Oh, okay," Riley said as if that explained everything.

"What's an Ottendorf cipher?" Lydia asked.

"They're just codes." Patrick obviously knew what it was.

"Each of these three numbers corresponds to a word in a key; usually a random book or a newspaper article," Dr. Chase explained. "In this case it's the Silence Dogood letters. So it's like the page number of the key text," Dr. Chase pointed to the number she was talking about, "the line on the page, and the letter in that line."

"So, Dad, where are the letters?" Ben asked, finally done with writing the numbers down.

"You know, it's just by sheer happenstance that his grandfather even found them; they were in an antique desk from the press room..." Patrick started rambling

"Dad." Apparently Ben had the same knot in his stomach that Lydia did, Grandpa never rambled, not unless he was trying to hide something.

"...of the New England Courant. That's a newspaper."

"Dad, where are the letters?" Ben asked when it was obvious that Patrick was done talking.

"I don't have them, son."

"What?" Ben and Lydia spoke as one.

"I don't have them."

Ben cleared his throat. "Where are they?" Ben asked; obviously fighting for patience, he sat down and pulled one of the gloves off with his teeth.

"I donated them to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia."

Ben's head dropped back in frustration. "Great," he muttered sarcastically.

Ben looked around the table as Lydia stifled a yawn; she glanced at the clock and realized that it was just after midnight. She wasn't used to staying up this late, even on a weekend. Finally Ben looked at Patrick again; when he started speaking it was obvious that he didn't want to be asking his dad this question. "Dad, can we spend the night here?"

"I don't have very many guest bedrooms set up, only Lydia's," Patrick said, "But if you want to get things set up then sure, you can stay here for tonight."

"Thanks Grandpa," Lydia said, stifling another yawn.

"Thank you Dad, we've had a long day," Ben said.

"A couple of you will have to double up; I've only got three guest rooms," Patrick said.

"My room is the only one with two beds," Lydia said.

"Looks like the girls will be sharing," Ben said.

Lydia bit back a groan; she was not looking forward to sharing a room with Dr. Chase. "Okay. I'll show you where my room is Dr. Chase." Lydia tried to sound polite.

"Thank you Lydia," Ben said, smiling at his daughter.

"I still can't believe it. All this time no one knew what was on the back." Lydia's eyes widened as she realized that Dr. Chase had spoken loud enough for Patrick to hear.

"The back of what?" He asked, leaning over a chair and picking up the document.

"No!" All four of them, Lydia Riley, Ben, and Dr. Chase spoke as one, but it was too late.

"Oh, my God. Oh, my God." Patrick saw the title of the Declaration and started to freak out.

"I know," Ben said, he moved to the other side of the table, making Lydia take a few steps to the side.

"Oh, my God. What have you done? This is... this is the..."

"I know!" Ben spoke sharply to get his dad's attention.

"This is the Declaration of Independence!" Patrick was finally able to finish a sentence.

"Yes. And it's very delicate," Dr. Chase said, gently taking the document from Patrick's hands, she started to put it away as Patrick turned to Ben.

Lydia looked over at Dr. Chase, trying to figure out if the woman had said what she had on purpose. Dr. Chase seemed to sense somebody looking at her and she looked up, her eyes landing on Lydia.

"I'm sorry!" Dr. Chase mouthed, as far as Lydia could tell, the woman's silent apology was genuine.

Lydia turned back to her father and grandfather as Patrick was saying, "There is no treasure! I wasted 30 years of my life. And now you've destroyed yours. And you pulled me and Lydia into all this."

"I went in willingly!" Lydia objected loudly.

"Well, we can't have you in the middle of it," Ben stated, he turned to the two youngest members of the group, "I changed my mind, we're leaving, Riley go get the duct tape from the van, Lydia go get some extra clothes from the spare room closet."

"I already did get some extra clothes for Dr. Chase, remember?" Lydia asked. "Right after I got here."

Ben nodded remembering that Lydia had packed a bag.

"I think some of this stuff would fit her," Lydia waved her hand in Dr. Chase's general direction but then turned to the woman who had just finished putting the Declaration away. "I'm not trying to be rude Dr. Chase, but you'll stick out like a sore thumb in that dress."

"You're right, I should change here," Dr. Chase said. She walked towards Lydia and the girl held out the pillow case.

"I know you're a little taller than I am, but the jeans might fit. I like longer jeans anyway," Lydia said. "I put a belt in there too; you look a little smaller than me."

The woman nodded and took the pillow case into the downstairs bathroom.

"Lydia, we will talk about your attitude later," Ben said quietly.

Lydia had to fight to keep from rolling her eyes, fathers could so over react sometimes, yes she could have been more polite, but it's not like Lydia had been insulting the woman.

By the time Dr. Chase came in again, Grandpa had been taped to a chair and Lydia was giving her grandpa a glass with a straw, "I don't want him to get dehydrated," Lydia was explaining to Ben and Riley. She stopped when she saw Dr. Chase come in to the room. Like all women, she'd looked pretty in the dress, but she still looked pretty, even though she'd changed into Jeans and a T-shirt. Lydia felt a little twinge of jealousy; she couldn't look that pretty in just jeans or a T-Shirt if she tried.

Ben and Riley turned when Lydia stopped talking and they saw Dr. Chase come in.

"Hey," Ben's voice had gotten soft as he looked at Dr. Chase.

Lydia took in breath and shared a glance with her grandfather; "With the anniversary being this week, he shouldn't be looking at her like that," Grandpa muttered quietly enough that Ben didn't hear them. "Not in front of you at least."

Lydia nodded tears stinging her eyes. She wasn't sure why this anniversary of her mother leaving hurt so much, it hadn't been half this bad last year, in fact she hardly ever thought about it. Why now?

"Ben." Grandpa got his son's attention. "There's a couple hundred dollars in my sock drawer, feel free to take it."

"Dad…" Ben started.

"I may not support this treasure hunt and I may not like the fact that the FBI is after you," Patrick's voice got low. "But I refuse to let my Granddaughter go hungry or without a bed every night."

"I'll be back," Ben said, he went up the stairs, presumably to get the cash from Patrick's sock drawer. He came back down, stuffing something into his jacket pocket. "Let's go." Lydia, Riley and Dr. Chase began to go out into the garage; Riley had already packed everything they needed into the Cadillac when he'd gone to the van for duct tape.

Riley and Lydia got into the back and Ben and Dr. Chase got into the front seats of the car. Ben started the car and pulled out of the driveway. As he turned to leave the neighborhood a car passed them and they all froze, Ben gave a shaky laugh, "if it were the FBI there would be more cars." He tried to speak in a reassuring voice.

Once they left the neighborhood they all seemed to relax a little bit. "Okay, now, where to go to spend the night," Ben said. "We can't exactly drive around Philadelphia for the next nine hours until the Franklin institute opens."

"We could go to a playground and park…" Lydia suggested.

"We will not be doing that," Ben interrupted. "We need beds, otherwise we won't be able to function properly in the morning; Ian and the FBI are after us, we need proper rest."

"How are we going to pay for the motel rooms though?" Lydia asked she dug into the purse she'd been using that night, waving the dollar in the air, "I've only got a dollar left from the fake Declaration fiasco..."

"You had over seventy dollars!" Riley interrupted.

"I had eighty two dollars, and since we had to pay for the fake declaration and the real one…." Lydia began.

"Lydia, Riley, chill or be chilled," Ben interrupted Lydia and Riley's fight. "We've got money; I stole this from his house." Ben held up a book so that the three other occupants of the car could see it. "We've got the money from his sock drawer and this." Ben passed the book to Dr. Chase "He always sticks a few hundred dollars between the pages."

Dr. Chase opened the book "Common Sense, how appropriate," she murmured setting the bills fall into her lap.

"Riley I want you to rent the hotel rooms; we'll have enough money if we go to the East end of Philadelphia."

"Rooms?" Dr. Chase asked, emphasizing the plural.

"With two single women, we can't exactly have the four of us share a room, so I think we'll split up boys and girls," Ben said.

"Fine with me," Riley said. "Wake me when we get to the hotel." He leaned back as much as he could in his seat and closed his eyes. "Ben, your Dad has a sweet ride, but it smells weird."

Lydia sat back in her seat and stared out the window.

"Lydia, when we get to the hotel I want to have a talk with you about something," Ben said cryptically.

"Right, you want to talk to me about my attitude," Lydia said, she knew she was asking for trouble, but for goodness sake, couldn't her dad at least lay off the doe eyes at Dr. Chase until Lydia weren't around?

Twenty minutes later, Ben had found a motel that he felt comfortable with and had sent Riley in to get a couple of hotel rooms for the night.

"Lydia, I want to talk to you outside, let's go." Ben got out of the car, after fumbling with the seat for a moment, Lydia was able to lower the front seat of the Cadillac and climb out.

"What is it Dad?" Lydia asked folding her arms across her chest.

"Cool off the attitude," Ben's voice was flat and hard but Lydia didn't even react.

"What attitude?" she asked innocently. Lydia knew full well that she was asking to be grounded, giving her Dad that much lip, but she really didn't care much at that point.

"Lydia Emmaline Gates, I'm not in the mood," Ben said sternly. "We have to have Abigail with us. She'd get arrested if she left us."

"And I can tell it's such a burden to have an extra person along," Lydia snapped

"Lydia, please just lay off the attitude, Dr. Chase might surprise you," Ben said.

"Maybe I'd lie of the attitude if you just freaking acknowledged that Mom left! Don't you think that would affect me?" Frustrated, Lydia shook her head and stomped off, Riley was coming up to the car; he had a couple of keys in his hands.

"You and Dr. Chase are in 213," he started, Lydia didn't give him a chance to finish, she grabbed the key he was holding out to her and stomped up the stairs, leaving the rest of the group behind.


	8. Chapter 8

**Thank you to those who reviewed last chapter! And if you didn't, I welcome kind reviews with open arms!**

**_Chapter 8:_**

Lydia grabbed one of the keys and stomped up the stairs, leaving the rest of the group behind, after finding 213 she went into the room and stomped into the bathroom; she was so sick of being ignored.

"I hate her!" she yelled, her voice echoing in the small room. "I wish she'd never come with us."

Lydia quickly used the bathroom, the entire time she did so she spoke aloud about exactly where Dr. Chase could stick the Declaration tubes. As she opened the door, she saw Dr. Chase in the room, there was an awkward pause as Lydia realized Dr. Chase had probably heard what she'd said.

"Oh, no, don't stop now," Dr. Chase deadpanned. "So, where exactly should I stick the tubes?"

Lydia just leveled a glare at the woman before washing her hands.

"Look, I know you don't like me…"

_No really whatever gave you that idea?_ Lydia couldn't help but think.

"But I think we should at least _try_ to get along at least until our names are cleared. Because like it or not, we'll be stuck together until then." Lydia didn't respond, she dried her hands and turned to the duffle bag that Dr. Chase had brought in; it was the one she'd packed that afternoon.

"Thank you for bringing my stuff in," Lydia said stiffly.

"You're welcome." Dr. Chase said in the same tone.

"You can use the bathroom to change if you want," Lydia said shortly, she wasn't trying to be rude but sharing a hotel room with somebody you didn't like was awkward.

"All right," Dr. Chase said. The woman grabbed a pair of Pajamas out of the pillow case "Can I wear these?" She asked. "When I was at the house I saw that these would fit."

"You can wear anything in the pillow case; sorry it's not in a real bag," Lydia apologized, "I couldn't find a duffle bag or backpack." The last part was said quietly, she went to one bed and sat down, after grabbing the remote she turned the TV on and leaned back against the wall.

While Dr. Chase went to the bathroom, Lydia flipped channels. There was nothing good on so she finally turned it off just as Dr. Chase came out. Lydia could only stare at the woman in shock, she _still_ looked pretty.

"It's not fair." Lydia didn't even realize she'd spoken until Dr Chase made eye contact with her in the mirror.

"What's not fair?" Dr. Chase asked.

"Nothing," Lydia lied; she turned away from the woman, tears stinging her eyes. She wished she'd brought Spot with her. She shook her head at that, she was sixteen, she shouldn't be wishing for her spotted stuffed animal.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Dr. Chase asked.

"Look…Dr Chase-" Lydia started she sat up and wiped at her eyes.

"Please, call me Abigail," Dr. Chase interrupted politely.

"Fine, Dr... Abigail," Lydia quickly corrected herself. "It's not that I don't like you," she said honestly, "it's just that I don't like-" Lydia paused. "You," she finished, she blew out a breath, frustrated. "I don't mean that, I –I just," she stammered, "this whole declaration thing is really stressful and the fact that my Dad hasn't even acknowledged-" she gave a short laugh as she shook her head in disbelief, "the fact that the anniversary of my mom's leaving is this week and…" Lydia trailed off in frustration, her voice getting thick with emotion.

"It's not me you don't like," Abigail interrupted again, she was speaking slowly. "It's the timing."

Lydia's eyes flew open as she realized Abigail had hit the nail on the head. "You're right, any other time of the year I'd be more okay with you, even if we were looking for the Declaration." She looked down at the garish pattern of the bedspread, tracing it with one finger.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Abigail asked again, the bed springs groaned in protest as the older woman sat next to her on the bed for a moment. Abigail reached out and touched Lydia's hair, some of it had come out of the pony tail she'd put it in earlier.

Before Lydia could answer there were a few knocks on the door to the tune of 'shave and a haircut.' Abigail and Lydia looked up at the sound of the knocks. "It's Dad," Lydia explained. She got up and walked towards the door. "It's our code if we've been fighting and he needs to talk to me about something unrelated to what we were fighting about."

Lydia stopped before she opened the door; she knocked on it twice and opened it.

Ben glanced into the room, looking from Abigail to Lydia. "Since you walked away so quickly I didn't get the chance to tell you we'll be leaving at eight in the morning, so be up and showered before then, we'll go for McDonalds."

"Okay," Lydia said. "I'm sorry I yelled Dad."

"I'm sorry I haven't talked to you about your Mom," Ben said glancing in again at Abigail, "But there's some stuff you don't know, about why I don't talk about her."

"Like what?" Lydia asked. _Seriously_, she thought, _how bad could it be?_

Ben hesitated, glancing behind Lydia to where Abigail was standing.

"You know what? I think I left the Common Sense book out in the car…" It was obvious that Abigail was making up an excuse but Ben took his keys out of his pocket and handed them to Abigail.

Lydia moved aside to let Abigail out and Ben in, he shut the door and sat on one of the beds. "This isn't easy for me Lydia," he started, "I hope you can understand that."

Lydia opened her mouth to say something but Ben interrupted. "But I also know that this has been hard on you as well, so…" Lydia sat back on the bed, moving herself so that she was leaning against the headboard.

"I can tell you one of two ways Lydia, I can just come out with all of it and tell you all tonight, or I can tell it to you little by little; to let you deal with all of it in your own way. Your choice."

"Why don't you start to tell me and we can see how it goes," Lydia said. There was a pause as Ben looked pensive. "Why did Mom leave?" Lydia finally asked.

"I-I wouldn't give up the treasure hunting," Ben said derisively. "That's what _she_ would tell you anyway." Ben turned so he was facing Lydia. "To be honest Lydia, there were a lot of things that led to her leaving. Do you remember the first summer you spent with Nana?"

"Yeah, I was about five right?" Lydia asked.

Ben nodded. "It was the summer before you started Kindergarten so that means your first summer at Nana's was the July and August before you turned six."

Lydia nodded as Ben kept talking. "Do you remember the year you started Kindergarten and then got pushed ahead to first grade? Do you remember what was happening at home?"

"Not really, I remember Mom was gone a lot, on business trips."

"Well, they weren't all business trips," Ben admitted. "She was in and out of rehab all year."

"Rehab?" This was news to Lydia.

"Yeah, she uhh-" Ben cleared his throat, "had a drinking problem. It got pretty bad before I made her leave for good."

"I don't even know how it started;" Ben kept talking. "She didn't start drinking until you were a few years old. I got tired of her going to rehab centers. They work for some people, just not her, not at that time anyway. I finally gave her an ultimatum when I found her having a scotch on the rocks at 6:00 am before driving you to school. That's when she made a big fuss about leaving and she left for the last time," Ben said.

"When she started screaming about how you wouldn't stop looking for the treasure?" Lydia asked. "I remember that."

"Yeah." Ben sighed deeply "that was..." he thought for a moment. "November of 1994. We had actually just started divorce proceedings."

"Why didn't she come back to see me?" Lydia asked.

"She tried," Ben said, "And" he sighed heavily, obviously he regretted something. I will be the first to admit that I kept you from her, but I did it for your own good. I refused to let her come in for random visits, you know like once every couple of months and on your birthday. I asked for her to come up with a regular schedule, and submit it to my lawyer." He shook his head a little bit, "we couldn't talk together, we disagreed too much, and we had to do everything through both of our lawyers. About a month went by before I asked my lawyer if she'd ever come up with a visiting schedule. He said she'd never approached him about it."

"Did you try to work things out with her?" Lydia asked.

"Yeah, that was the summer you spent at Nana's; the first one anyway. We sent you to my Mom's house to get you out of the way."

Lydia's mouth dropped open in protest. "I don't mean that in a bad way Ladybug." Ben said, using Lydia's childhood nickname. "I just… I didn't want you to know about it. It's hard to have an adult conversation when your five year old is asking for crayons or chocolate, or a trip to the community swimming pool."

"We tried working things out and I thought it would be fine, but then…" Ben stopped talking.

"But then what?" Lydia asked quietly.

"You moved back in and I was just trying to make sure you got to school on time and did your homework. I thought things would work out," Ben repeated his earlier statement, "And late that November was when I found her drinking a scotch on the rocks at 6 in the morning, before getting you ready for school."

"I completely flipped out, we had just spent the _entire_ summer working on her addiction and to me, it looked like she wasn't even trying to stay sober."

Lydia sat back on the bed and blinked back tears, _what's so terrible about me that she couldn't stay sober around me_? She wondered. "What happened then?" she asked. It was like a bad dream, she hated hearing it, but she needed to know.

"You were still asleep, I made the bad decision to confront her before you were sent off to school, she started in on me still going after the treasure and then she left."

Lydia remembered what Riley had said earlier, in the van, "Do you ever think that maybe if you'd stopped looking for the treasure she would have stayed, and been able to get sober?" she asked.

"Sometimes I wonder if things could have turned out differently if I hadn't confronted her so badly, if I had _talked_ to her, instead of yelling." Ben started, "but no, if I had stopped looking for the treasure she wouldn't have gotten sober." He sighed deeply, and Lydia realized her father looked about ten years older.

"Addictions are scary things Lydia and those who are addicted to things, whether it is drugs, alcohol, pornography or anything else, if they don't _want_ to get clean, they won't. They'll just continue to blame anything and everything they can. If I had stopped treasure hunting back then, your Mom just would have turned the blame on something else," Ben said. _Somebody who means a lot more to me then a treasure hunt._

Lydia nodded. "Okay."

Ben didn't start talking again and Lydia finally spoke, "What happened then?"

"I started divorce proceedings, it took a while, but Molly signed over custody at the final signing. We had planned to keep in contact, but she never answered any of my letters, the divorce was bitter enough that we decided to keep in contact through our lawyers unless it was an emergency. Every time we move, or change phone numbers I alert our lawyer about it but Molly never responds."

"I remember going to court and bringing Spot." Lydia spoke of her stuffed dog, the lovey she'd had since birth. "I lost him in the court room and we had to go back to get him."

"Yeah," Ben smiled faintly. "I knew you wouldn't be able to sit through the whole thing so I let you bring your coloring book and Spot, which annoyed your mother to no end, but at least it kept you quiet."

Lydia nodded she opened her mouth to say something but yawned widely instead.

"I'll let you get some sleep," Ben said; "we can finish talking about this in the morning." He got up from the other bed and leaned over to kiss Lydia's forehead "Goodnight," he said.

"Goodnight," Lydia said, just before yawning again.

"You have a key right?" Ben asked.

Lydia nodded. "Yeah, you gave Abigail your car keys; let's hope she hasn't driven off to alert the FBI of our whereabouts."

"I'm sure Abigail wouldn't do that," Ben said, but he glanced towards the door nervously, as if expecting an FBI SWAT team to come bursting through the door at any moment.

"Dad I have a question…." Lydia said.

"What is it Ladybug?" Ben asked.

"Could you please stop flirting with Abigail until _after_ we get out of this mess? As much as I like the fact that you're actually interested in a woman, this really isn't the time and the fact that Mom left ten years ago next week isn't exactly helping matters."

"I'll do my best Lydia," Ben promised.

Lydia got up, and walked to the little bathroom to brush her teeth. "You'll come and get me and Abigail at 8:00?" She asked looking at her Dad through the mirror.

Ben nodded. "Yeah," he said, turning and opening the hotel room door to find Abigail leaning up against the railing looking over the city. "I'm surprised you didn't drive off with my Dad's car," he commented dryly.

Abigail turned at the sound of Ben's voice. "I don't drive a stick shift," she shot back instantly. "Besides, I'd probably be arrested for aiding and abetting you. I know I wouldn't last a day in Prison so my best bet is to stay with you Lydia and Riley and clear my name by finding the treasure."

"So you believe the treasure exists?" Ben asked.

There was a pause as Ben and Abigail looked at each other. "I'm not sure yet," Abigail said.

Lydia turned the water on to get her toothbrush wet and Ben and Abigail started a little, as if they'd forgotten that Lydia was in the room with them. "I better go make sure that Riley hasn't…..uhhh," Ben trailed off as he tried to think of an excuse to leave. "He hasn't uhhhh damaged our room in some way."

"How could he have damaged the room?" Abigail asked in a flirty tone of voice. Lydia shuddered and tried to keep from gagging.

"I-I don't know," Ben muttered before leaving. Abigail's eyes followed Ben to the next room where Lydia heard the sounds of a door opening and closing. Abigail came into the room and closed the door.

Lydia finished brushing her teeth and rinsed her mouth out. She could see Abigail looking at her through the mirror. "What?" she asked after spitting the water back into the sink.

"I think we should try to get to know each other a little bit, we will be spending time together while we clear our names."

Lydia paused for a moment. "Sure," she said unenthusiastically, she couldn't see anything _wrong_ with the idea; she was just very unenthusiastic about it.

"So, what do you want to do when you graduate from High School?" Abigail asked.

"I want to go to College?" Lydia muttered sarcastically, but she cleared her throat and started talking. "I'm hoping to get into George Washington University and get a PHD in International Relations and Communications, a Masters in French History and then work as a Foreign Service Officer in the French Embassy."

There was silence at the other side of the room and Lydia looked up as she dug into her duffle, Abigail was looking at her in surprise, "What?" Lydia asked.

"You have high expectations Lydia," Abigail said. "But I think you would be a very good Foreign Service Officer."

Now it was Lydia's turn to be surprised, she knew she'd been rude to Abigail and the woman was actually complimenting her? "Thank you," Lydia said quietly.

"You're welcome," Abigail said, she sat on one bed and Lydia pulled back the covers on the bed she had picked.

"So what did you want to be when you were little?" Lydia asked.

"I was actually in the ballet in my youth," Abigail said.

"You were?" Lydia asked. "Why'd you stop?"

"I blew out my knee." Abigail said, "And the director of London's Royal Ballet did not have the patience for an injured young woman to heal."

"I'm sorry." Lydia said, "That must have really sucked."

"Well the director at the time was a _stinkende idiot_," Abigail snapped something in German.

"What's that mean?" Lydia asked.

Abigail paused and Lydia assumed that Abigail had sworn in German, "it's like idiot, but ruder," she said.

Lydia shrugged, "How did you decide to come here and work in the National Archives?" She asked.

"I had good marks I was able to get into Harvard. I got a major in Museum Studies, and a Masters in Archival History," Abigail said, she looked across the empty space between hers and Lydia's bed. "Why do you want to be a Foreign Service Officer?" She asked.

"I love the French language," Lydia said, surprised that she was sharing this much with a woman she didn't know very well. "The French III class at my school goes to France during the Christmas Break and I'm hoping my Dad lets me go," Lydia said, she smiled, "I also enjoy learning about politics and the way the Government works."

"Well, I for one think you'll be a wonderful Foreign Officer," Abigail repeated.

"Thank you." Lydia said again.

There was an awkward pause as Lydia and Abigail got lost in their own thoughts, Lydia yawned and said quietly. "Umm, I should probably get some sleep I'm really tired."

Abigail nodded. "Of course," she said as she got up and went to the sink to wash her face.

"I'm sorry." Lydia said, Abigail paused on her way to the bathroom. "I should be politer to you; it's not like you begged and pleaded to come along, we kind of made you." Lydia trailed off, she wasn't sure what else to say but she knew that her apology to Abigail needed to be nicer.

"It's alright," Abigail said apparently understanding what Lydia was trying to say, "I understand."

Lydia smiled faintly as she lay down on the bed; she took her glasses off and put them on the table in between the two beds.

"Abigail?" Lydia asked from the bed, she didn't know why, but for some reason she hoped that Abigail wouldn't hear her.

"Lydia?" Abigail turned the water off and turned, water dripping down her face, her make up running. "Did you say something?"

"Yeah," Lydia sat up again, leaning up against the wall behind her bed. "Thanks, for listening."

"You're welcome Lydia." Abigail said before drying her face and dropping the towel on the counter.

"Would you like to talk some more?" Abigail asked, coming over to the bed and sitting down.

Lydia shook her head as she yawned again. "Not right now." She said, "but thanks for the offer, it's nice to talk to a woman who won't go back to reading essay's." At Abigail's confused look, Lydia explained, "My Nana is great, but she's a bit of a workaholic." Lydia rolled her eyes. "Even during the summer," she added.

"What does she do?" Abigail asked.

"She works at UMD," Lydia said, laying back down and getting comfortable again.

Abigail still looked confused so Lydia enlightened her once more, "University of Maryland, she teaches at the one in Baltimore."

"Baltimore is closer to DC then Philadelphia, why didn't we go there?" Abigail said, moving to her bed and pulling back the covers.

"Nana's in Mexico, she's teaching a summer abroad in Guadra…" Lydia paused, knowing that she was pronouncing it wrong. "No," Lydia shook her head then corrected herself. "Guadalajara. Plus Grandpa's the one who has…had," Lydia corrected herself again, "the Silence Dogood letters."

"Okay." Abigail said it quietly; she reached up to turn the light off as she asked; "Do you want the light off?"

Lydia nodded "Yeah." She said, closing her eyes. The light clicked off and Lydia soon fell asleep.

**_

* * *

_**At the other end of the country, Molly Prewet hung up the phone as she finished making flight reservations for her and Brandon. She was taking a big gamble but she had scheduled three tickets home from Washington DC, if she had it her way, Lydia would be with her when she came home.

* * *

**For some reason to me, Ben and Lydia's last conversation makes Ben seem like the bad guy, which he really isn't, he made some bad _choices_ but he isn't the bad guy. In addition to the divorce, things got out of both Ben and Molly's control and they _will_ be resolved in later chapters.**

**Sooooo, what do you think? Leave me some love in the review box! (Or some hate, I'm chill with either**.)


	9. Chapter 9

**Here's chapter 9! I hope you all enjoy it! :D**

**Chapter 9:**

The next morning, Lydia woke up before Abigail; the bedside clock said that it was only a few minutes after 7. She turned the TV on quietly and flipped channels. She flipped to a news channel, something she was used to watching in the morning as she usually was required to talk about a news piece in her History class. The news lady wasn't someone Lydia was used to seeing and she leaned back on the bed.

"The father-daughter couple who stole the historical document were filmed in the National Archives gift shop, if you see either of these people, please contact the FBI at once."

"Oh Fudge!" Lydia swore loudly as hers and Ben's pictures were shown on the television screen. Abigail woke up at the sound of Lydia swearing at the TV.

"What?" the woman asked sleepily, Lydia simply pointed to the TV and said, "watch."

Abigail turned to the TV and stared, her mouth dropped open a little bit and she leaned forward staring at the TV. "Are you on TV?"

"At the top of the FBI's most wanted list." Lydia said. "Umm, why don't we get ready quickly? Something tells me that Dad will want to get out of here ASAP."

"There is a great possibility that they are working with Abigail Chase, an archivist at the National Archives," the reporter on the TV continued.

"Ach nein, haben Sie das nicht gesagt!" Abigail said in German just as Lydia spoke:

"Dude." She spoke to the Newscaster, "It would have been _easier_ to steal the Declaration if she'd been helping us!"

"I wouldn't have helped." Abigail objected Lydia nodded in agreement.

"I know," she said, "but I'm just saying, you would have been able to make it easier on us," Lydia explained honestly.

"Jennifer!" Lydia started as there was a pounding on the door of the hotel door.

"Yeah Dad?" Lydia called remembering that Jennifer was the name that she had agreed to go by at the gala.

"Let's get started early." Ben's voice was calm and collected but Lydia could tell that he was nervous.

Lydia and Abigail exchanged a look before glancing at the clock, it was 7:15.

"Sure, ummm…" Lydia glanced at Abigail "a fake name…" she hissed to Abigail.

"Diane," Abigail said quickly pronouncing it Di-on, Lydia nodded and called out the door:

"Diane and I need to get dressed first."

"Okay, but hurry," Ben said.

"We will," Lydia said, getting up out of bed.

Both Abigail and Lydia quickly got dressed and packing up their clothes into their respective bags.

They got out to the car just behind Riley and Ben. "Lydia, I want you in the back seat." Ben said.

"Okay," Lydia said, she climbed into the back and pulled the driver's seat towards her so Ben could sit down. Riley came into the back through the passenger side getting comfortable in the spot he'd been in the night before.

"Riley get out," Ben ordered. "I want you in the front, I need you to drive since we're on the news if I were driving we'd get pulled over."

"Who else will be in the front?" Riley asked getting out of the car. "I'm the only one of our group that the FBI doesn't seem to know about."

"I can do my make up differently so that I'm not completely recognizable; I brought some make up in my clutch," Abigail said, as Riley got out of the car and Ben got into the backseat.

"Do it, Lydia and I will stay in the back while we decide what to do for the two of us." Ben said.

Lydia moved her backpack when Ben got in behind Abigail but she left it on the floor.

She sighed and leaned her head back, what would happen next? Riley pulled out into traffic started to follow the verbal directions Ben was giving him.

They pulled up into the nearest McDonalds just as Abigail finished doing her makeup. Lydia leaned back as far as she could in the car, she didn't want to be found, she knew her dad would go to Prison.

"It's okay Ladybug," Ben murmured taking her hand and squeezing it. "The back is big enough that no one will be able to tell we're back here unless they stuck their head in."

Lydia nodded; she glanced at her dad uneasily. "What are we going to do after Breakfast?" she asked, as it was only 7:30, the Benjamin Franklin Institute didn't open until 9:00.

"I actually need some clothes, these are just a little too tight, it's not your fault Lydia, I should have told you what to bring." Ben said.

"We should probably split up," Ben said, "Riley and Lydia, go to the Franklin Institute and get the message. The FBI is looking for a group of three, there's a greater chance of us not being picked up by the FBI if we split up."

"Ben, it kind of scares me how much you know about _not_ being picked up by the FBI,"  
Abigail said.

"I don't have any previous experience if that's what you're asking; I'm just using common sense," Ben said

"What does everyone want?" Riley asked as he pulled up to the drive-through.

"I want Pancakes!" Lydia spoke up instantly, "and a milkshake."

"You are not having a milkshake this early in the morning." Ben objected, "It's not even eight o'clock."

"I'm going to need energy dad!" Lydia complained, she opened her mouth to protest more but Ben interrupted her.

"You know that fruit will give you more energy than ice cream, you did a paper on it in your nutrition class."

Lydia rolled her eyes yeah she knew that, but still, she wanted a milkshake. "Dad!" she drawled the word out frustrated, it was a milkshake, for crying out loud.

"If you want energy, get the parfait." The tone of Ben's voice told Lydia not to argue.

"Fine, I want the pancake breakfast, a parfait and orange juice," Lydia huffed.

"I'll have the same," Abigail said.

"I'll have the breakfast sandwich; the one with the eggs, sausage patty and cheese." Ben said.

Riley leaned out of the car to order when a police car pulled up behind them.

"Oh crap." Riley said seeing the car in the side mirror; Lydia glanced behind her and saw it.

"Oh snap!" she said loudly, whirling around and pressing up against the back of the seat.

"What is it?" Ben was trying to move the bag at his feet, so he hadn't seen the police car.

"Don't turn around, but a cop car pulled up behind us," Lydia said.

Ben froze, eyes widening in horror. "Please tell me you're joking," he immediately said.

"Sorry Dad, I'm telling the truth," Lydia said.

"Welcome to McDonalds, how may I help you?" The drive through microphone crackled to life. Riley gulped nervously; "I'll take two pancake breakfasts with a parfait and orange juices…" he trailed off as he turned to the rest of the car, "What do you want Ben?" He asked again.

"I'd like a number four, please." Ben said

"I'll have a number four and a…" Riley quickly scanned the board trying to decide what to have for breakfast. "Number eight," he finished.

"I'll have four orange juices too," Riley said into the microphone.

"All right, two pancake breakfasts, two parfaits, one Big Breakfast and the egg Mcmuffin combo and four orange juices?" the lady on the other end clarified the order.

"Yes."

"That will be 26.53 at the first window." The lady said, "Please pull up to the next window."

Riley slowly pulled up to the next window, while Lydia looked through her backpack for a book. Something she had just noticed about her Grandpa's car was that there was a back window behind the driver, when the food was passed to the car, Lydia might be noticed.

She opened the book and pretended to be reading it while Riley paid for the breakfast, then pulled up to the next window.

Once breakfast was in the car, they pulled out of the small strip mall and went to the nearest park to eat.

"Riley, do you have any ideas as to how get the message?" Lydia said, picking up a pancake whole and folding it in half before taking a bite.

"Lydia, use utensils," Ben ordered. Lydia put the bitten pancake down and started using her utensils on the pancake.

Nearly an hour later, Lydia and Riley had figured out how get the message from the Silence Dogood letters and were getting ready to drive to the Institute.

"Drop us off at Urban Outfitters, would you Riley?" Ben asked as Riley started the car up again.

"Sure."

Lydia's face fell, "I love Urban Outfitters," she said, disappointed.

"Lydia, when we find the treasure you can use some of the money to buy a whole new wardrobe." Ben said.

Lydia smiled to herself and finished off her orange juice.

Riley drove until they were in front of the Urban Outfitters closest to the Franklin Institute.

"We'll be back in about half an hour," Riley said as Ben and Abigail got out.

Ben and Abigail went into the store, hoping against hope that they wouldn't be recognized. They quickly found clothes and started to try them on. When they found some that fit, they quickly went to the back to buy them, once they were bought, Ben and Abigail went back to the dressing rooms to change, on the way there Abigail started talking. "So you show up at your father's door and say you're in trouble and the first thing he assumes is I'm pregnant," she said as they got into the stalls.

"Is there a question in there?" Ben asked, locking his door and starting to get dressed.

"I think there's an interesting story in there," Abigail admitted.

"It's happened before, with Lydia's mom." Ben explained, "my father thinks I've been a little too cavalier in my personal life."

"I see," Abigail said, mulling over what Ben had said

"Let me ask you something. Have you ever told someone not a relative - "I love you"?" Ben asked.

"Yes." Abigail said, as she put her shirt on.

"More than one someone?" Ben seemed genuinely curious and Abigail stuck her head over the door to the dressing room to look at him.

"Yes."

"Oh. Well, then my father would say you've been a little too cavalier in your personal life, too," Ben said in a matter of fact tone of voice.

"So you and Lydia get your sense of absolute certainty from him, right?"

"Well, I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Ben said, as he put jeans on.

"Well, you're certain the treasure is real, despite what anyone else thinks," Abigail responded.

"No, but I hope it's real," Ben started talking. "I mean, I've dreamt it's real since my grandfather told me about it. I want to hold it. I feel like I'm so close, I can taste it. But I just..." Ben paused. "I just want to know it's not just something in my head or in my heart," Ben said, swinging open the door and putting his arms on the top of it.

"People don't really talk that way, you know," Abigail said, putting her chin on her hands.

"I know," Ben said, he paused. "But they think that way." Ben quoted something Lydia had said a few days earlier.

Abigail jokingly made a slight face at him, "Who told you that?" she asked.

"Lydia, she's a lot smarter than I ever was at her age." Ben said, "She wants to take some test that will push her ahead to her senior year, but I refuse to let her take it."

"Why not?" Abigail asked. "She might not pass it."

"Yes she would," Ben said instantly.

"So why don't you…" Abigail started,

"_Because_ she'd pass it," Ben emphasized.

Abigail raised an eyebrow at Ben; he launched into an explanation. "The summer before Lydia turned eight she spent it with her Nana. I actually had a temporary job in Baltimore very close to where my mom lives and my mom wasn't teaching that summer so we moved out there for a couple of months. I would come home to Lydia and she'd be waiting for me at the door. My mom has a window seat that looks out onto the front lawn of her house and Lydia would sit there and she would race out to see me every day when I came home to her from work, the door would burst open and Lydia would come racing out, pigtails bouncing, throw her arms around me and tell me how much she'd missed me." There was a pause "And then one day…." Ben trailed off.

"Yes?" Abigail asked, wondering what had happened to Lydia.

"I blinked and she's not the seven year old who ran out to meet me, she's sixteen and she's _already_ looking at colleges. She wants to go to University of Maryland you know, where my Mom teaches. She's not sure what she wants to major in though."

_She told me George Washington University,_ Abigail realized. _And that she wants a PHD and a Masters_.

"I guess I'm not ready to let her go just yet." Ben sighed. "Lydia's all I have."

Abigail pursed her lips quietly, thinking.

* * *

A couple miles away, Riley and Lydia had parked the car and were standing across the street from the Franklin Institute. "There's usually a homeless man sitting right there," Lydia pointed to the benches and the wall. "He asks the people who get off the bus for change. I've seen him before; he's always here during the summer time." Lydia insisted as she watched her plans go up in smoke. They had been planning on asking the homeless man who lived across the street from the Franklin Institute to go inside, they were willing to pay him a dollar for each set of letters that he got, but now the homeless man wasn't there.

"Do you think we should go in?" Lydia looked hesitantly at the marble building. "What if the FBI tracked down my Grandpa and he told them where we were going?"

"Good point," Riley observed their surroundings. A hot dog vendor was selling two dogs to a young couple, and a yellow school bus pulled up to the curb. Lydia and Riley watched as the doors to the bus opened and a twenty-something-year-old Teacher's Aide climbed out, followed by about eighteen students dressed in matching uniforms.

Lydia suddenly had an idea. "I have an idea," she grinned at Riley. "Just follow my lead." Approaching the Aide, she began, "Good morning, miss! My colleague and I are new recruits of the Franklin Institute…" She racked her brain for something that sounded fun. "…History Mystery Squad…"

Riley snickered; Lydia stepped on his foot very lightly. Beaming at the Aide, she continued, "…And we'd like to tell one of your students – a very bright one – about the mysterious history of the Silence Dogood letters that are displayed in the museum. May we borrow one of your students for this…" Lydia hesitated as she tried to come up with something. "Life-changing experience?" _Oh, Heavens, _she thought shaking her head slightly. _That sounded cheesy…_

The Teacher's Aide barely glanced at Lydia and Riley. "Look," she looked again and looked down to Lydia's height. "Kid the only reason I'm doing this is for the pay. I barely know the kids' names – pick one yourself." She strutted off towards the museum steps, her students following her. One kid hung behind though, and shyly approached Lydia and Riley.

With wide eyes, the kid asked, "Are you from the CIA?"

Lydia shook her head, and bent down to the kid's height. "The FBI? He asked. Lydia shook her head again and he kept talking, "Do you work for the government?"

Lydia laughed. "Not yet, kiddo. Give me a couple of years though. What's your name?"

"Joseph."

"Okay, Joseph, my name is Lydia, this is Riley." Lydia pointed to Riley as she spoke. "And we'll pay you a dollar for every set of letters you bring us – go inside, find the Silence Dogood letters, and write down each capitalized letter in order on here." She handed Joseph a sheet of paper and a pencil, and then explained how to recognize the letters he needed to get. When she was done with the explanation, she lowered her voice and continued speaking, "We'll give you an extra ten bucks if you don't tell anyone what you _really_ did."

"How many pieces of paper are there?" Joseph asked.

"There are nine pieces of paper and then the extra ten bucks, so you'll get nineteen bucks." Lydia said.

With that, Joseph grinned and bounded inside the museum. "Wow," Riley sounded impressed. "You have a way with kids."

Lydia shrugged and grinned wryly. "It's amazing what two summers of being a Youth Teacher's Aide at Camp Apple Valley can get you."

"Cool," Riley went to the benches and sat down; Lydia picked up her backpack and followed.

Twenty minutes later, Lydia and Riley had gotten much of the message, Joseph came up to them with the next five letters of the message.

"S-S-A-N-D." Joseph said to them as Lydia handed him a dollar.

"OK."

"You're sure this is right?" Riley asked Lydia rolled her eyes and elbowed him. "S-S-A..." Riley trailed off as he finished

"No, N," Joseph said correcting Riley's horrible penmanship.

"That is an N," Riley shot back.

"It doesn't look like an N," Joseph said solemnly.

"You know what? Here; last one." Riley gave Joseph the last sheet. "OK? One more dollar. Thank you. Go get the last four letters. Go get 'em, chief."

"What's the message so far?" Lydia asked, leaning in and reading from the paper Riley had been writing on.

"The vision to see the treasured past comes as the timely shadow crosses in front of the house of pass and..."

"Pass and…" Lydia thought for a moment and remembered that her history book was in her backpack, unzipping it; she grabbed the book and flipped it open to the index figuring that it might have something in it.

"Whoa." Lydia grabbed at the book as it nearly fell off her lap, as she did so she looked down and saw that there was a file folder in her backpack. She was confused; she didn't remember putting a file folder into her backpack.

Bending, she reached down and opened it partway, not taking it out of her backpack.

It was the copies of the Silence Dogood letters. The ones they had spent 20 minutes looking for the night before.

"Snap," Lydia said.

"Stow!" Riley said, "Pass and Stow!" he was looking at a bus that had just pulled up. "We've got the message let's go back to your dad." Riley said getting up.

"Okay." Lydia said, she dropped her history book back in her bag and pulled the wad of bills out and dropped the ten on the bench, Joseph was supposed to come back and she didn't want to cheat the boy out of the money she'd promised him.

Lydia stood and zipped up her bag as she walked, the less time they stayed in one place the better.

Lydia and Riley quickly drove back to Urban Outfitters, going up the stairs to where Ben and Abigail were standing around.

"Hey." Ben said, walking towards Riley and Lydia. "Did you get it Riley?" he asked.

"Oh, we got it." Riley grinned. "The vision to see the treasured past comes as the timely shadow crosses in front of the house of Pass and Stow." He read the message "Now," he looked up at Ben and Abigail "Pass and Stow, of course, referring to..."

"The Liberty Bell." Ben, Lydia and Abigail spoke as one.

"Why do you have to do that?" Riley asked, frustrated.

"We're history Geeks," Lydia responded instantly.

Abigail smiled. "John Pass and John Stow cast the bell," she explained to Riley.

"OK. Well, then, what does the rest of this mean?" he asked.

"Wait..." Ben said, thinking, "'the vision to see the treasured past' must refer to a way to read the map."

"Wait," Lydia said, "I thought the cipher was the map."

"No, the cipher was a way to find the way to read the map," Ben said, Abigail started talking too, and together the older two members of the group figured out that they needed to be at Independence Hall at a certain time.

"What time?" Lydia asked, frustrated that they were ignoring her and Riley.

Ben's eyes snapped open as he turned to the check out lady in the store. "Excuse me, can I see one of those hundred-dollar bills I paid you with?"

"No," she said shaking her head.

"Oh." Ben realized that he would need to hand over something as collateral. "Well, here, I have this diver's watch. It's called a Submariner. I dive with it. It's actually quite valuable. You can use it as collateral," he offered

The girl took the watch and then gave him the hundred dollar bill. "Whatever," she muttered.

"Now." Ben was in his lecture mode, "On the back of a hundred-dollar bill is an etching of Independence Hall based on a painting done in the 1770's, who…" Ben started to get excited. "The artist was actually a friend of Benjamin Franklin's."

"Really?" Lydia found it quite interesting.

"Now, I think that if we look at this clock tower..." Ben used a water bottle to magnify the etching. "...we may find the specific time."

"What do you see?"

"2:22," Ben said.

"What time is it now?" Lydia asked.

"Almost three." The store clerk said, looking at the watch Ben had given her to use as collateral.

"We missed it." Abigail leaned up against the table in disappointment.

"No, we didn't," Riley said. "We didn't miss it because..." Riley stopped talking as he realized that none of the others were about to interrupt him, his eyes widened in shock. "You don't know this? I-I know something about history that you don't know?"

"I'd be very excited to learn about it, Riley," Abigail said.

Well, hold on one second, let me just...let me just take in this moment. This is... this is cool. Is this how you feel all the time? Because, you know... except for now, of course.

"Riley, do you want me to punch you?" Lydia snapped.

"All right." Riley stopped playing games. "What I know is that daylight savings wasn't established until World War I. If its 3pm now, OK, that means in 1776 it would be 2pm."

"Riley." Abigail started, "You're a genius."

Ben gave back the hundred dollar bill and the group of treasure hunters quickly left the store.


	10. Chapter 10

**Here's chapter 10! I'm sorry it's taken so long, I hope to post with more regularity from now on.**

**Chapter 10:**

"Mommy when are we going to see Lydia?" Brandon asked. "I wanna meet her."

"I want to see Lydia too." Molly said as she navigated her way to the baggage claim. "We'll get to see her soon Bran." She turned, losing sight of him momentarily in the busy airport. "Brandon, hold onto my hand and don't let go," She ordered once she saw him again.

"Okay Mommy." Brandon slid his hand through hers. At six, he normally he didn't like holding his mom's hand but he was excited about meeting his big sister for the first time and he knew he had to obey his mother.

"We'll get out of here as fast as we can and go to Mr. Sadusky's office and then we'll see Lydia." Molly told her son.

"Neat!" Brandon said.

It took them nearly half an hour to get both pieces of luggage from baggage claim and out of the airport. When they were both in a cab, Molly called the number Agent Sadusky had given her.

"Ms. Prewet?" Agent Sadusky's voice crackled over the phone.

"I'm here in DC," Molly said. Peter quickly gave her the address of the Head FBI Office.

After she gave the cab driver the address she leaned back and tried to relax she could hardly believe that after ten years, she would finally get to see her little girl again. Ben would no longer be able to keep Lydia from her.

"Agent Sadusky?" Molly and Brandon didn't even stop off at a hotel before showing up at the FBI office.

"Ms. Prewet. It's nice to meet you."

"It's nice to meet you too Agent, I wish the circumstances were better." Molly said.

"As do I," Peter said, he led Molly and Brandon to a private room. "Now what is this treasure you were talking about on the phone?"

Molly quickly told Sadusky what she could remember. As she finished up, there was a knock on the door and an agent stuck his head into the room. "We found Gates car in Philadelphia, we have an agent waiting there already."

Agent Sadusky nodded "All right,"

"Mommy, where's Philadelphia?" Brandon asked. He'd been silent while the adults had talked, drawing on some paper he'd had in his backpack, but now he was curious.

"It's in Pennsylvania." Molly said. "It's about 2 hours away."

"Do we have to go there Mom?" Brandon complained, his face screwing up in disgust. "I don't want to be in the car for so long."

"If it's all right with you Molly," Sadusky said, "Brandon can stay here with Agent Dawes, she has experience with children."

"If you're sure it's all right." Molly said her voice lowered. "Since the FBI is a part of this I really hesitated to bring him, but I couldn't get a hold of anyone to baby sit."

"As long as he stays with Agent Dawes he should be all right." Sadusky said quietly. "I know you left at the last minute."

Molly nodded and turned to Brandon. "Bran," she said, "you're going to stay with Agent Dawes, all right?" she said. "That way you don't have to stay in the car for a long time."

"Cool!" Brandon said, he grinned and for a moment, Sadusky could see resemblance between Brandon and the pictures he'd seen of Lydia.

A female agent came into the room. "Agent Dawes," Sadusky said, "I'm leaving you with Brandon here."

"Hi Brandon," Agent Dawes said, sitting down a few chairs away from the boy. "How old are you?" she asked.

"I'm six." Brandon said. "I'm in the first grade."

"Cool, I remember the first grade; it was a lot of fun." Agent Dawes said.

Sadusky and Molly quietly began to leave. "What's your name?" Brandon asked the female agent.

"My name is Anne." Agent Dawes said, the two adults left the room and then began to go downstairs to an FBI vehicle.

"Thank you for making sure that Brandon is cared for, I worried about bringing him." Molly said quietly.

"Its fine," Sadusky said, he held a door open for Molly and they left the Hoover building. "Now let's go see if we can't get your daughter back."

*~*~*~*Meanwhile in Philadelphia*~*~*~*

Lydia, Ben, Riley and Abigail were at the centennial bell, trying to find the next clue for the treasure. "What bell is this?" Riley asked as they climbed up into the belfry.

"Centennial Bell; it replaced the Liberty Bell in 1876," Lydia said.

"There it is," Ben said, he was looking through the windows in the belfry. "All right, I'm gonna go down there, and you three meet me in the signing room."

Lydia and Abigail both nodded and they moved with Riley to the stairway. The group separated and Lydia, Riley and Abigail all went to find the signing room where they stood around nervously waiting for Ben to come down and show them what he'd gotten.

"You're supposed to be with a group." A voice suddenly said. The group of three turned to find a tour guide; she looked them up and down with a raised eyebrow.

Lydia was about to speak up when Abigail began speaking in German. Lydia couldn't understand what the woman was saying, but she figured Abigail was trying to confuse the tour guide.

The tour guide raised her other eyebrow "Great," she said, "Bill lost his foreign tourists."

Lydia and Riley both tried to look confused, as if they really didn't speak English. The tour guide turned to Lydia. "Do you speak English?" she asked.

"Sorry, I don't speak English," Lydia spoke in French. "I only speak fluent French. Of course I'm lying when I say this but I just want to make sure I don't get into trouble for being in the signing room without a tour guide."

Abigail suddenly turned and it sounded like she was trying to keep from laughing, and Lydia remembered that Abigail spoke French.

The tour guide apparently didn't see this and she turned to Riley. "Yo no hablo Inglés" He said in Spanish, not giving her a chance to say anything to him.

The tour guide moved to the middle of the room and began her speech about the signing room, soon she finished and the group moved on. "Stay here." The tour guide told them loudly as if they were deaf, and not pretending to be foreign tourists. "I'll bring your tour guide back!"

"Crap." Lydia said to Abigail once the tour guide was out of the room. "We're in trouble."

"Hey. What'd you score?" Riley suddenly said; Lydia turned to see her father coming into the room.

"I found this." He said, from his jacket he pulled out a pair of old fashioned glasses.

"Some kind of ocular device." Abigail said, looking at it.

"The vision to see the treasured past," Ben quoted part of the poem from the pipe. "Let me take this." He grabbed the declaration gently and began unrolling it slowly. Riley took the glasses and looked thought them.

"Aw, they're like early American X-ray specs," Riley was clearly in awe at the odd looking glasses.

"You know, Benjamin Franklin invented something like these," Abigail said.

"So, what do we do with them?" Lydia asked, taking them from Riley he handed them to her.

"We look through them." Ben said, stating the obvious.

"Here, help me." Ben kept unrolling the declaration and Abigail began helping him keep it steady.

They pulled open the declaration and held it flat; Ben suddenly looked at the declaration in amazement, as he let out a breath of wonder.

"What?" Lydia asked.

"I just realized that the last time this was in here, it was being signed," Ben said.

The whole group smiled and took a moment of silence to soak in the thought. Then, almost wistfully, Lydia began to sing, "Sit down, John…"

Ben and Abigail laughed as Riley's face broke out into confusion. Ben, too, began to sing, "For God's sake, John, sit down…"

Ben and Lydia sang togther, in perfect harmony "Too many flies, too many flies…"

To their surprise, Abigail belted out one of the last lines, "Somebody open up a window!"

Ben grinned at the confusion on Riley's face. "It's from the musical 1776," he told the younger man.

"Best Musical EVER." Lydia grinned.

"Oh I love it." Abigail agreed, "I haven't seen it in forever though."

"Hey, if we get out of this without getting arrested we should totally watch it; we have an old VHS copy of it," Lydia said.

"That sounds great." Abigail said.

"Yeah, there's another group coming." Riley interrupted loudly "Why don't you both plan your girl bonding time at a later date?"

"Turn it over. Careful," Ben said, the group turned the declaration over and he reached for the glasses, Lydia handed them to him, Ben put them on and looked at the back of the declaration.

"What do you see?" Riley asked.

"What is it? Is it a treasure map?"

"It says, "Heere at the wall"," Ben said, "spelled with two E's."

"Take a look." He handed the glasses to Abigail and the woman looked through them.

"Wow," she said, she handed the glasses to Lydia who carefully put them on and looked at the declaration.

"Oh wow." Lydia was in awe at what she saw; it was much different then what she had expected to see.

"Why can't they just say, 'Go to this place, and here's the treasure, spend it wisely?' " Riley asked, before Ben could answer though, he saw movement outside. Frowning, he hurried to the window to check.

"Oh, no."

"What?" Lydia asked, looking up. "Oh, no," she echoed her dad as she saw Shaw and Victor outside.

"How'd they find us?" Riley asked.

"Ian has nearly unlimited resources." Ben said, "And he's smart. I don't think we can get out of here without being spotted." He continued. "Well, we don't want them to have the Declaration, or the glasses." Ben packed up the glasses into his jacket. "But we especially don't want them to have them both together."

"We're splitting up?" Lydia asked.

Ben nodded. "Yes," he said.

Lydia glanced around, "Who's going with whom?" she asked.

"I'll take this." Ben took the red tube that they usually used to protect the declaration and swung

it on one shoulder. "And these," Ben patted his jacket where the glasses were. "You three keep that." He pointed to the white tube Lydia and Abigail were putting the Declaration into. "Meet me at the car and call me if you have any problems."

"Like if we get caught and killed?" Riley asked, clearly he thought they would get caught.

"Yeah. That would be a big problem." Ben stated flatly, he turned, getting ready to leave. "Take care of her," he said as he left.

"I will." Riley, Abigail and Lydia spoke as one. They glanced at each other nervously, which _her_ had Ben been talking about? Lydia, the Declaration or Abigail?

The rest of the team waited for a moment before leaving as well, they went to the front door and waited until Ben was about halfway across the street before leaving the building. "This way." Abigail abruptly turned, leading the way. The three of them walked quickly trying to keep from getting people's attention but wanting to get away from Independence Hall as quickly as possible.

"Look out! Look out!" Lydia, Abigail and Riley all turned when they heard Victor and Shaw's shouts. "There they are! Move!"

"Move!" Lydia said to Abigail and Riley, the three of them broke into a run, dashing inside an enclosed marketplace, hoping that the crowd would help conceal them.

"Come on." Lydia heard Abigail say, she and Lydia veered to one side, not realizing that Riley was going to the other side.

"This way," Abigail said, out of breath, she and Lydia turned down an isle some meat and vegetable stands. Abigail pushed Lydia towards them, "Go." She ordered.

They ran down the long aisle, occasionally looking behind them, "Go!" Abigail ordered and pushed Lydia towards a meat stand. Lydia vaulted over it and landed on the other side, ducking behind the low cover. Abigail did the same thing, getting close to Lydia who was shaking.

"If you're not a steak, you don't belong here." The butcher said, she looked down at the two of them, an eyebrow raised.

"I'm just trying to hide from my ex-husband." Abigail said instantly.

"Please," Lydia pleaded, "My step-father is really scary." She played along with what Abigail had said.

"Who, baldy?" The butcher looked around; apparently Victor was still looking for them.

"Yes." Abigail said Lydia nodded quickly, a couple of tears leaked out, Shaw and Victor had always scared her, and she knew that neither one of them liked her; it wouldn't take much for them to decide to hurt her.

"Ladies, stay as long as you like." Lydia would have laughed at the way the woman had said that but she was too scared.

"Oh, thank you. Thank you."

"You want something?" the Butcher asked, Abigail turned around a little, but she gasped and quickly turned back around eyes wide.

"What is it?" Lydia mouthed to Abigail in confusion; Abigail shook her head and motioned for Lydia to stay down.

"Do you want something?" the butcher asked again, sounding a little annoyed.

"Shut up." They could hear Victor's voice and Lydia hunched down a little more even though she was well hidden, she could feel Abigail grabbing her hand and squeezing it reassuringly.

"I see why you left him," the butcher told the women before turning back to her meat.

Lydia and Abigail waited for a few more minutes to be sure that Victor had gone before they stood up and left.

"Good luck getting rid of him," the butcher said, both Lydia and Abigail nodded as they left.

"Thank you." Lydia said as they left in search of Riley. They went to the flower aisle, "Riley wouldn't have gone far." Lydia was saying, "He promised Dad he'd take care of me."

Just then, Lydia felt someone touching her shoulder, screaming, she turned around, ready to kick whoever was touching her.

She relaxed instantly though when she saw who it was. Riley.

Abigail glared at Riley, "Where were you?" she asked.

"Hiding." Riley said, "Come on. Let's go, let's go." He pulled an arm around Lydia's shoulders and guided her out of the market place.

"Watch out! Get out of my way!" The group of three turned as the heard someone shouting.

"Oh come on!" Lydia said, as they turned back around and started running again. They ran out of the marketplace and ran down the street, Lydia didn't even know where they were headed, all she knew is that she was having trouble breathing and Riley and Abigail were getting ahead of her.

"Get her!" Lydia could hear Victors voice yelling. She looked behind her and saw that he was nearly to her; she put on a burst of speed and actually managed to run past Riley, and up to Abigail. She slowed once she saw a street however, but she wasn't planning on nearly getting run over by a bike.

Lydia screamed as she and Abigail were both knocked onto the pavement by a biker. The white tube with the Declaration in it flew from Abigail's grasp and bounced into the street.

"No!" Lydia screamed again, she got up and started to run into the street, horns honked and brakes squealed in an attempt not to hit the teenager. Just as she got to the tube, she felt a couple of pairs of hands reach out and grab her. They pulled her out of reach of a bus that raced past her and over the tube that housed the Declaration.

"The Declaration!" Lydia gasped for air as she, Riley and Abigail hit the pavement again on the sidewalk.

None of the group could stop Ian from appearing across the street and taking the tube. He opened it up and made sure the Declaration was in there; he smiled and capped it again.

Lydia, Riley and Abigail got up and they started running down the street again. They needed to get to the car and away from Shaw, Victor and Ian.

They went about half a mile before Riley called Ben. "I'll take the blame for it Lydia," Riley promised.

"Riley you don't have to, I'm the one who dropped it."

Riley waved a hand in Lydia's direction, indicating that he needed to hear, "Hey Ben," he said into the phone, there was a pause. "We lost it." Another pause, "We lost the Declaration. Ian took it." Lydia turned away from the phone; it was all her fault Ian had gotten the declaration.

"We're all fine." Riley paused, "Ben, I'm sorry." The regret was clear in his voice.

"Riley," Lydia started; he shook his head and turned away from Lydia.

"Okay, we'll meet you there." Riley finished up on the phone and hung up. "Let's go to the car." He said.

"Riley, you didn't need to cover for me, I'm a big girl."

"Lydia, I told you its fine." Riley argued.

"Ri-ley," Lydia started drawing his name out.

"Ly-di-a." Riley shot back, he stopped, and turned around to face Lydia, "I'm going to cover for you. We would have lost it anyway, no matter who was holding the tube, Shaw and Victor were right behind me. They would have grabbed it if it hadn't fallen from your grasp."

Lydia quietly shook her head in frustration; it was her fault the Declaration had gotten into Ian's hands.

Why don't we go to the car and after we talk to Ben we can figure out who's to blame for this?" Abigail suggested.

Lydia, Riley and Abigail quickly started walking in the direction of the car, they needed to get their entire group together and figure out what to do next.

Ben hung up with Riley and began to make his way into the car, trying to figure out what they needed to do next, alert the FBI and hope they weren't arrested on site?

Before Ben knew it he was at the car, as he made to unlock it though, a man stepped out from the small bookstore the car was parked in front of.

"Mr. Gates; turn around and face your father's car please." As the FBI began to arrest him, Ben looked around worriedly; hopefully Lydia wouldn't see him being arrested.

Just as he finished hoping that, Lydia, Riley and Abigail turned the corner, once they saw the FBI though the group of three quickly (and quietly) turned around and left.

Ben shook his head as he tried to rid his mind of the image of his daughter's face as she realized her father was being arrested. He shouldn't have brought her along; he should have left her at her Grandpa's house.

He was thinking so deeply about this he didn't realize that they were driving, he followed the agents from the car into the FBI office, only snapping out of the stupor when he was hit alongside the head with what felt like a purse.

Gasping in surprise he gaped at the woman standing before him, his eyes narrowing in confusion for a moment before he realized who it was.

"Molly?"

* * *

**Please Review! Follow me on twitter! I'm (at ) authorsomeday**


	11. Chapter 11

Okay, it's been forever since I updated. Sorry about that! Here's chapter 11, thank you to those who have taken the time to review I love getting reviews!

Ben gaped at the woman standing in front of him, "Molly?" he gasped a second time, aghast that his ex was there.

"How could you keep my daughter away from me?" Molly's voice was thick with emotion as she yelled at Ben. "I called every month for years asking for updates on my baby girl!"

"We never got the calls, did you call the house?" Ben asked, "Our home number hasn't changed."

"No, I called the lawyers; remember when we decided to have everything go through them because we couldn't agree on anything?"

"Well I called my lawyer every week for three years after the divorce was final." Ben explained. "Lydia could tell you."

"Oh please, you just probably just brainwashed her into thinking you're the good guy. So how many times have you left her with strangers while you went gallivanting off to look for treasure?"

"I always left her with her Nana or Grandfather!" Ben objected, "I never left her with strangers, just because they're strangers to you, that doesn't mean that they're strangers to Lydia or I."

"Please!" Peter interrupted the fight. "We need to get Lydia back, Mr. Gates, please tell us about the treasure."

Ben turned to Sadusky and raised an eyebrow, "Can you promise that she won't talk?" he asked, jerking his head in Molly's direction.

"Yes," Sadusky said, knowing it might be the only chance they'd have to get Lydia back.

Ben nodded and quickly began to tell Agent Sadusky what had happened. Finally though, he finished.

"That's some story," Sadusky said casually, as he sat back in his chair.

"Well, it's the same story I tried to tell you guys before the Declaration was stolen," Ben said, trying to control his temper.

"By you."

No, by Ian," Ben said, forcing himself to stay calm. Getting angry at an FBI agent wouldn't do him any good. "I stole it to stop him. I did it alone. Neither Dr Chase nor my daughter were willingly involved. And Ian still ended up with the Declaration of Independence."

"Because of you."

Ben sat back in his chair, trying not to get too frustrated, he knew that getting angry at the FBI agent would only make things worse, but the FBI agent didn't understand why Ben had stolen the declaration. Sadusky began to speak again. "So here's your options: Door number one, you go to prison for a very long time. Door number two, we are going to get back the Declaration of Independence, you help us find it, and you still go to prison for a very long time, but you feel better inside."

"Is there a door that doesn't lead to prison?" Ben's tone was derisive.

Sadusky actually laughed, "Someone's got to go to prison, Ben," he said, still smiling at Ben's joke. There was a long pause, "So what are these for?" He held up the glasses Ben had gotten at Independence Hall.

"It's a way to read the map." Ben explained.

"Right. Knights Templar. Freemasons. Invisible treasure map. So what'd it say?"

"Heere at the wall." Ben sighed. "Nothing else. It's just another clue."

"It looks like Ian Howe could be a false identity." An agent spoke from another desk.

"Follow up with ATF and INS." Sadusky told them.

Molly suddenly made a noise, as if she wanted to say something by wasn't sure what to say. Ben looked over at Molly. "How have you been doing?" He asked.

"Ummm." Molly suddenly sounded anxious. "Good, I remarried after I moved to Portland and I've got a little boy, he turns 7 in January."

"Wow, that's amazing, congratulations. Is that where he is now? With his dad?"

"No. David died while I was still pregnant with Brandon. I brought him with me but left him in DC with another agent."

"And you complain that I've left my kid with strangers?" Ben asked sarcastically.

Before Molly could answer, the phone rang drowning out whatever she may have said.

"Checking source," one agent said.

"Unknown number." Another agent responded.

Sadusky nodded at Ben who answered the phone.

"Yes." Ben spoke shortly, not wanting to waste time on pleasantries.

"Hello, Ben. How are you?" Molly could hear the British tone and a chill went up her spine.

"Um, I'm chained to a desk," Ben said, as if stating the obvious.

"Sorry to hear that."

"Funny, he doesn't sound sorry." Molly muttered. Ben gave Molly a sharp look and she glared at back.

"I want you to meet me on the flight deck of the USS Intrepid. You know where that is?"

"Yeah, New York," Ben said, wondering what Ian had up his sleeve.

"Meet me there at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. And bring those glasses you found at Independence Hall. Yeah, I know about the glasses." Ian paused for a moment before continuing to speak. "We can take a look at the Declaration, and then you can be on your way."

"And I'm supposed to believe that." By Ben's flat tone it was clear that he didn't believe what Ian was offering.

"Well you come or something happens to Lydia."

Ben sucked in a breath. If Ian even thought of hurting Lydia, he would wish he'd never been born.

"Dad?" Lydia's voice suddenly came onto the line. "Come to New York. He'll give you the Declaration. I'm holding it right now, it's safe."

"Lydia, are you all right?" Molly suddenly interrupted, Sadusky jerkily waved a hand in her direction and one of the female agents laid a hand on Molly's arm, motioning her not to talk.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "Dad, you have to come to New York, the USS Intrepid. He'll give you the Declaration." Lydia repeated.

"I told you from the start, I only wanted to borrow it." Ian's voice suddenly came back on the line. "You can have it. And the glasses. I'll even throw in the pipe from the Charlotte."

"I'll be there." Ben promised, "Can I talk to Lydia?"

"No." Ian's refusal was short. "And tell the FBI agents listening in on this call if they want Lydia and the Declaration back, and not just a clip of hair and a box of confetti, then you'll come alone."

* * *

Lydia went back over to Abigail and Riley, confused. Who was the woman on the other end of the line? Who had interrupted Dad? It seemed unprofessional enough that it couldn't have been an FBI agent, but who else would be listening in on the phone call?

"What's wrong?" Abigail asked, placing an arm around the teen.

"Ummmm," Lydia started, and then the story spilled out, about being on the phone with her dad and that a woman had interrupted the phone call asking if she was all right.

Abigail pursed her lips and gave Lydia a look. "I don't think an FBI agent would be that unprofessional." She said.

"I know," Lydia agreed.

"Is it possible that your mom was the one who spoke?" Abigail asked. "Ben did mention her."

"Why would the FBI bring her in though?" Lydia asked. "She gave up custody of me when they divorced."

"I don't know Lydia." Abigail said, she kept a protective arm around the teen as Ian walked over to them. "We'll see when we get the Declaration back and get you back to your dad."

Lydia nodded and looked up as Ian stood in front of them. "Let's go." He said quietly.

* * *

**USS Intrepid New York**

Ben looked around the ship as hundreds of people walked around him, he didn't know where the agents were, but faintly, he could hear them through his ear piece.

"Take positions. Perimeter looks normal."

"Can I get a status report?"

"Crow's nest in position. Port side is quiet." The answer came from Ben's left.

"Copy that."

"Gates is on the flight deck."

"Eyes on Gates."

"Do not lose sight of primary mark."

"Brian, you're clear with NYPD."

Ben looked around the flight deck as the agents prepared themselves.

"I have a visual."

"Gates."

"Yeah?" Ben asked quietly, not wanting to attract attention.

"Stay with the program."

"I hope your agents are all under four feet tall and wearing little scarves. Otherwise Ian's gonna know they're here." Ben said dryly as about 15 boy scouts passed him.

"As soon as he shows you the Declaration, we'll move in. Don't try anything. Just let us handle it. We'll get Lydia in safe too."

"You know, Agent Sadusky, something I've noticed about fishing: it never works out so well for the bait," Ben said.

Before Sadusky could respond to that, another agent interrupted. "Sir, we've got some traffic incoming. Looks like a sightseeing helicopter."

"Unit two, get an eyeball on that chopper. Agent Michaels, get FAA flight plans and authorization records on that craft. If that's not Mr. Howe, I want to know who it is."

"I got him. He's coming from the north," one agent said. Ben craned his neck to look at where the helicopter was coming from.

"Gates. Are you with me?"

"Well, I'm sure not against you, if that's what you're asking. Ian's got my kid, that means she's in danger, you clearly don't believe me about the treasure, but do you honestly think I'd do something stupid enough to get my little girl killed?"

Ben couldn't hear Sadusky's response as the helicopter seemed to be trying to land on the flight deck and in the commotion Ben couldn't hear any of the agents.

"Hello, Ben." McGregor was suddenly beside him, with a video camera, playing the part of the tourist. Ben shot him a wary glance. "Thomas Edison needed only one way to make a light bulb."

Ben's eyes widened considerably as Victor kept talking.

"Sound familiar?"

Ben nodded.

"Go to the starboard observation point behind the F-16, and here's what you do."

When Victor finished giving Ben the instructions, Ben could hear the Agents, through his ear piece again.

"Gates? Gates? All agents, report in."

"I can't see anything."

"Did Gates speak to anybody?"

"Target is moving," one agent said as they saw Ben heading towards the F-16.

"He's heading towards the stern."

"I've got him. He's coming this way."

"Anyone got a view of our friend Ian Howe?"

"Ian Howe is not at the stern, sir."

"Then why is he heading there?"

"He's at the observation deck."

"Sadusky. Ben reached the observation point and leaned up against the railing. "I'm still not against you. But I found door number three. And I'm taking it. Molly, I promise to get Lydia back here in one piece." And with that, he jumped into the Hudson.

Ben fell into the water and almost instantly started looking through the murky water, McGregor had promised….. THERE! The diver was there and giving Ben an oxygen mask. The propel was started and they were soon going through the water. They crossed the Hudson and Ben climbed out of the water to find Shaw waiting for him.

"Hello, Ben. Welcome to New Jersey."

"What'd you do with Lydia, Abigail and Riley?"

"Hope these fit. We had to guess your sizes." Victor said, shoving a stack of clothes into Ben's arms.

"I said, what'd you do with Lydia, Abigail and Riley?" Ben asked, getting angrier. "Lydia or Riley are the only people who could have told you that line about Edison."

"Did you bring the glasses?"

"I don't know." Ben lied stubbornly. "They could have fallen out in the water. Tell me what's happening here."

"Ask your girlfriend. She's the one calling all the shots now." Shaw looked disgusted. "She won't shut up."

Ben smiled as he got into the car, he should have known that Lydia and Abigail would do their best to get the upper hand, now he just had to hope that luck was with them and they all kept the upper hand.

* * *

Abigail dialed the number to Shaw's phone; it rang a couple of times and then was picked up. Abigail motioned to Lydia as she answered.

"Hello?" Even though Lydia wasn't the one with the phone, she could clearly hear her father.

"Hi, sweetie. How's your day going?" Abigail said, hoping that Shaw and Victor had mentioned Abigail's lie about being Ben's girlfriend.

"Uh, interesting, dear." Ben said, confused. "So, what, you working with Ian now?"

"It turns out helping someone escape from FBI custody is a criminal act. And he's the only criminal we knew. So we called him and made a deal," Abigail said.

Well, you're...You're... you're... you're all right, yeah? I mean you're safe?

"Yes." Abigail said, "we all are, Ian hasn't gotten a hold of Lydia, she's safe." Abigail promised "but, it turns out that his little threat of hurting her was false, he hasn't touched her." There was a pause before Abigail changed the subject. "Riley's right here, doing something clever with a computer."

"I'm tracking him through the... Hey!" Riley started talking to Ben as Abigail gave him the phone. "I'm tracking you through the GPS in Shaw's phone. They take a turn anywhere we don't want, we'll know it. So don't worry."

"If Ian tries to double-cross us, we can call the FBI and tell them right where you are. And where to find Ian." Abigail took the phone from Riley and started talking to Ben again.

"And where is that?" Ben asked, almost as if her were talking to Lydia, and trying to coax her into finding the answer. Lydia rolled her eyes, she found it a bit on the patronizing side.

"Right across the street from where we're hiding," Abigail said, somewhat proudly, "At the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway."

"Well, you figured out the clue." Ben said, proudly.

"Simple. 'Heere at the wall.' Wall Street and Broadway." Abigail said, but then paused before she began to tell Ben the catch. "Ben, there is a catch." She took a deep breath. "We made Ian believe he could have the treasure. It was the only way we could get this far."

"He's here." Riley announced.

Lydia went to the window of the internet café they were at, a car was just pulling up and Ben climbed out with Shaw and Victor.

Lydia could see Ian and her dad talking and they exchanged some small talk. They talked for a good ten minutes before Ben pulled out his cell phone and called Lydia's phone, the three of them left the café as a couple of Ian's minions came with them, however, they were guiding Patrick along with them, and Lydia's jaw dropped open.

"Grandpa?" she asked, "What are you doing here?"

"They kidnapped me." Patrick said, "You're all right, right Lydia?"

"Yeah, none of Ian's minions touched me." Lydia promised, "And neither did Ian."

"Good." Patrick said, they all entered the church together, to find the Ben and Ian were already inside, they were at the front of the church, and Shaw pushed Lydia and Abigail into a pew, Riley quickly followed them, glaring at the man.

Lydia fidgeted in her seat, while she'd gone to church with her grandmother on several occasions these pews were more uncomfortable then the ones she was used to sitting in. She wanted to go see her dad, and to talk to him, but because McGregor was standing there, she couldn't exactly just get up and go to him.

Soon though, Ian was motioning to the group and they all got up and walked to the front.

"Dad." Lydia hugged her dad but their reunion was cut short as they were pushed towards a set of stairs. After seeing that Lydia was with Riley, Ben turned to help Abigail, who was being pushed by McGregor. Ben grabbed Abigail's arm to steady her and Abigail spoke.

"I'm so sorry, Ben…." She started.

"None of this is your fault." Ben's tone was comforting.

"I co..." Abigail began but then Shaw grabbed her arm.

"Come on," he said.

"Look. Cooperation only lasts as long as the status quo is unchanged. As soon as this guy gets to wherever this thing ends, he won't need you any more. Or... or any of us." Patrick said to Ben. The older man had walked slowly and father and son walked side by side. Lydia slipped back to walk by the two of them and Ben quickly put a protective arm around the teenager.

"So we find a way to make sure the status quo changes in our favor," Ben said quietly, keeping his arm around Lydia.

"How?"

"I'm still working on it." Ben admitted.

"Well, I guess we better work on it too, then," Patrick said.

"Hey! Par... Hey, I found it! Him! Ben!" Riley announced from the other side of the small room. The entire group went to where Riley was standing to find a tombstone with the name Parkington Lane carved into it.

"It's a name. Parkington Lane." Ian said, leaning in close to the headstone.

"He was a third-degree master mason of the Blue Lo..." Ben got cut of as Shaw and Victor stepped forward. "Hey! Stop!"

Lydia gasped as Shaw and Victor suddenly used crowbars to break open the tomb. They reached and pulled out the casket, but as they were lowering it to the ground the bottom fell off and the body fell out. Lydia tried to keep from throwing up as a musty smell reached her nostrils.

"Careful no one steps in him." Lydia shuddered at Victor's creepy laugh, she hated him.

"All right, put it down."

"OK. Who wants to go down the creepy tunnel inside the tomb first?" Riley asked.

Lydia couldn't help but giggle at that, Riley always seemed to know when humor was needed.

"Right. McGregor, Viktor, you stay here." Ian began. He grabbed Lydia's arm, dragging her with him as he started to enter the creepy tunnel.

"Hey!" Riley objected, just as Ben and Patrick objected as well.

"Let go of her!" They both spoke at the same time.

Just then Ian was shoved against the crypt wall and Lydia was pulled out of the tunnel. Abigail had pulled Lydia out and had positioned herself between Lydia and Ian. "Don't you touch her." Abigail's voice was a threatening growl.

Ian looked surprised and, if Lydia understood his facial expression correctly, a little scared of Abigail. Finally he turned to McGregor and Victor again. "If anyone should come out without me, well... use your imagination."

He motioned to Lydia and Riley. "Shall we?" he asked, clearly wanting them to go first.

They went into the tunnel and soon it opened up to a larger tunnel and Lydia waited for her father to come in before she kept walking. He stopped though, examining something on the wall. He picked up an old torch and examined it for a moment before turning to Ian. "You got a light?" he asked.

"Here." Ian lit the torch and then Ben used his torch to light another couple of them. Light filled the cavern and Lydia suddenly wished that they hadn't lit the torches, there were spider webs everywhere and Lydia could see clearly every time they brushed against them.

"Stay with Abigail." Ben muttered. "The farther you are from me, the safer you'll be," Lydia nodded, she didn't fully understand what her father meant by that but she knew better then to disobey him.

"Careful." A voice called and the group moved to the side to keep away from the hole in the boards beneath them, Lydia tried not to look down but she glanced down and had to grab onto Abigail's hand to keep from getting too scared. The older woman laid a hand on her arm. "You're safe, Lydia," she said.

"Watch your step." Ben was helping Patrick over some sort of stairs. Lydia was next and Ben helped her over. "I love you Lydia." He breathed, his hand tight on hers.

"I love you too Dad." Lydia said, confused, what was going on? Ben was quite affectionate, and the words "I love you" weren't strange to her; his desperate tone was. It was almost as if he thought he wouldn't see Lydia again.

Abigail was next and Lydia turned as Ben helped her over and then pulled her to him to kiss him. Lydia smiled to herself now. The kiss was short and Lydia quickly turned so that neither her Dad nor Abigail could see that she'd been staring.

"Why does that never happen to me?" Shaw's voice was morose as he followed them.

"Because you're like, an unsub." Lydia muttered to herself, but secretly she smiled. She hadn't liked Abigail at first, but she suddenly found herself hoping that Dr. Chase and her father would get together after this was all over.

Ian stepped our of the tunnel, "What's this?"


	12. Chapter 12

**I'm all sorts of sorry about not posting this chapter sooner, I've been super busy. Anyway, here's chapter 12, there's only one more chapter after this as sad as I am about this story coming to an end it means I can start on the sequel! Enjoy!**

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"What's this?" Lydia looked up as they walked into a bigger room, there was a winding staircase leading down and Lydia stepped to the side as she looked around the dark room and let her eyes adjust.

"It looks like a chandelier." Lydia couldn't help but say sarcastically. The look Ben sent her made her shut her mouth. Yes, Lydia, don't talk when there are angry men with guns.

"How do a bunch of guys with hand tools build all this?" Shaw asked incredulously.

"Same way they built the pyramids and the Great Wall of China." Ben said quietly, as if afraid that a loud tone of voice would cause a cave in.

"Yeah, the aliens helped them." Lydia giggled again at Riley's comment. Riley could be so funny sometimes.

"Right, let's go. What are we waiting for?" Ian pointed to the staircase and Patrick blanched.

"I'm not going out on that thing." His voice was firm. "200 years of termite damage and rot."

"Dad, do what he says." Ben spoke up; Lydia shook her head in disbelief. She couldn't believe that Grandpa was saying that he didn't want to do what Ian was saying. Sure, neither did she, but last she'd checked Ian was the one with the gun. To her it seemed like a smart idea to do what Ian wanted. Patrick started down the stairs though, with no further complaint. The rest of the party formed a single-file line behind the man.

"Watch your step." Lydia couldn't tell who had spoken but she followed the directions and stepped over the missing board when she passed it.

"We're right under the Trinity graveyard. That's probably why no one ever found this." Patrick spoke now, it almost sounded like he was trying to lighten the mood.

_Not working, Grandpa._Lydia thought to herself.

"What is that?" Lydia and Riley spoke as one as the entire world started shaking. They all held on to the banister as the shaking increased then decreased and finally went away.

"Subway," Ian said, a smirk on his face. Lydia wanted to smack it off of him; she didn't find anything funny about this situation.

"Shaw!" One of Ian's minions was the one who (cut) shouted. Lydia turned to she what had happened. The banister started to shake again, and she grabbed it. It was as if the stairs were trying to keep the treasure safe by not allowing Ian and his minions near it.

"Oh, God, Shaw!" Ian's voice shouted.

"Oh, my God." Abigail clutched Lydia to her, not letting the teen see what was happening to Shaw. The stairs stopped shaking and Lydia looked up for a moment before they started shaking again.

"Hold on! Hold on!" Ben's voice was a shouted order to Lydia.

"OK, get on the elevator. Jump!" Patrick ordered, Ian jumped on but before Lydia could jump on, the stairs gave another shudder and she jumped with Riley down to another set of stairs that looked more stable.

Lydia turned as the entire stairwell started falling, and then started swinging out over the chasm. Abigail and Ben were hanging onto boards for dear life.

"Dad!" Lydia's scream echoed against the nearest wall.

"Ben! Grab my hand." Patrick was leaning towards him holding a hand out, but before Ben or Abigail could jump, the entire staircase shuddered again and Ben grabbed onto Abigail to keep her from falling. The entire world seemed to slow down as Abigail dangled over the edge and they swung across the entire chasm.

Finally though, Ben dropped Abigail when they swung over a set of stairs. Then he rolled over and grabbed the Declaration as it nearly fell. He swung over a set of stairs and fell onto it with a loud crash.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I dropped you. I had to save the Declaration." Ben spoke to Abigail who had gotten up and rushed over to him.

"No, don't be." Abigail said as Lydia and Riley carefully came down the stairs to where Ben and Abigail were standing. "I would have done exactly the same thing to you."

"Really?" Ben asked, a small smile dancing on his lips.

"I would have dropped you both. Freaks." Lydia nodded in agreement to Riley's statement.

"Get on." Ian's voice made them turn. The elevator had traveled down to the group.

"Ian... it's not worth it." Ben spoke slowly, clearly trying to talk his way out of this situation.

One of Ian's eyebrows's raised. "Do you imagine any one of your lives is more valuable to me than Shaw's? We go on."

Ben looked between Lydia and Abigail but Patrick spoke then, making Ben turn.

"The status quo. Keep the status quo."

Lydia, Riley, Abigail and Ben all got onto the elevator. Lydia looked up at Abigail for a moment; the woman squeezed her shoulder and pulled her close.

"I'll keep you safe Lydia." Abigail's promise was quiet but firm.

Lydia nodded, she had no idea what was going to happen next. She just wanted this entire thing over with.

*~*~*~*Meanwhile in Alexandria*~*~*~*

Molly Prewet walked down the hall of her daughter's school. With Ben having a warrant out for his arrest, it looked like she was going to get custody of Lydia, and she was packing up her daughter's things so that when Lydia and Ben were found she could take Lydia back to Oregon with her, or maybe she'd take the position she'd been offered in Texas, and not tell Ben where she was going, see how her ex-husband liked not knowing where his daughter was.

She stopped by her daughter's locker and did the combination that the school had given to her. "Lydia!" a boy's voice made her turn. He was about her height with sandy blonde hair. The boy seemed surprised that it was not Lydia at the locker. "I'm sorry, I thought you were Lydia." He apologized.

"That's all right, I'm her mother, do you have a message for her?" Molly asked.

Now the boy's eyebrows rose, "I thought you'd left." He said bluntly, then seeming to realize what he'd said was rude. "That's what Lydia said anyway."

"I didn't leave, I was forced out." Molly said tersely, _damn Ben and his influence_she thought.

"If you were forced out how come Mr. Gates made Lydia write letters to you?" The boy asked.

"What do you mean?" Molly asked.

"Well, ever since she started here in like, the 2nd grade every few months her dad made her write a letter to her mother updating her on her life." The boy said.

"What are you talking about?" Molly asked, "I've never heard about these letters."

"Here, she gave me one last week to edit, you can have it." The boy opened his binder; Molly could see the boy's name at the top of his papers: Dylan Thomas it read.

"She wanted you to edit the letter?" Molly asked confused. Lydia wasn't that bad at writing was she? This looked like a prestigious school; surely Lydia wouldn't be a grade ahead of her chronological peers if she was having difficulty with something as simple as writing a letter.

"Yeah, she's not your biggest fan but she does make sure whatever she does is done to the best of her ability." Dylan said, his cheeks flushed slightly as he finally found the letter and handed it to her. "That's not something you see in most 16 year olds, she's pretty great."

It was only about half a page but she looked up at Dylan now, her manner more humble. "Did you say that Ben made Lydia write a few of these per year?" She asked, wondering if she'd heard him wrong.

"Yeah, well, during the school year at least he did. I don't know about the summer time. I know about the ones during the school year because those were the letters I edited." Dylan said.

"How well do you know Lydia?" Molly asked, letting the locker close behind her.

"Pretty well, we'd both be graduating together if Mr. Gates would let her take the test to skip ahead, but she's not a total nerd, just smart." Dylan said.

"Can we talk? Molly asked, "I have a few questions about my daughter."

"Sure, I'm assisting in the office this period so I do need to tell them where I'll be but I can meet you at the Café in about 5 minutes." Dylan promised.

Molly nodded and they separated, she quickly found her way to the Café and after getting a corndog she sat at a table and started to read the letter Lydia had written.

_Dear Mom;_

_I suppose this letter is going to sound a lot like the last letter I sent because frankly, I've still got the same questions._

_What did I do that was so horrible that you had to leave? Is there anything I could have done that would have changed your mind?_

_I love Dad, don't get me wrong but I need a mom. Dad's pretty good and I love him, but I just need a woman to talk to sometimes._

_Even though I'm mad and hurt that you keep sending these back maybe you'll open this letter and read it. Also, I do hope that things are going well for you, and that you are enjoying where life has brought you._

_You can call my cell any time, (571) 555-7493._

_Lydia_

*~*~*~*Meanwhile under New York City*~*~*~*

"Now what?" Lydia heard someone say, they were reaching the bottom of the shaft and the elevator slowed and finally stopped.

"This is where it all leads." Ben said quietly as they got off the elevator.

"What is this?" Riley asked, Lydia had to admit, she was wondering the same thing, the room they had entered was completely bare.

"So where's the treasure?" Ian asked.

Ben kept quiet, as he looked around the room; Lydia followed her father with her eyes. What was he doing?

"Well?" Ian asked.

"This is it?" Riley was dumbfounded. "We came all this way for a dead end?" He demanded.

"Yes." Ben said simply, and Lydia raised an eyebrow to herself. Her father seemed to be giving up quite easily, it didn't sound like him.

"There's gotta be something more." Riley insisted.

"Riley, there's nothing more." Ben stated.

"There has to be." Lydia spoke up now, "Another clue, or..."

"No, there are no more clues!" Ben's voice rose to a shout. "That's it, OK? It's over! End of the road. The treasure's gone. Moved. Taken somewhere else."

Lydia sighed and leaned back against the wall, there had to be another clue, there just had to be! The only way to keep her father from being arrested was to find the treasure.

"You're not playing games with me, are you, Ben? Hm?" Ian asked, he had his gun out again. "You know where it is."

There was a long pause, "No." Ben finally spoke.

Ian motioned to his minion and the two men quickly moved back to the elevator. Patrick, Lydia, Riley Abigail and Ben all moved to get on to the elevator but Ian started it, but then stopped it as soon as it was far enough away from the room that one of them could climb aboard.

"Hey, wait a minute!"

"Ian, wait!"

"Wait, wait, wait!" It seemed like everyone but Ian and his minion was speaking.

"We'll be trapped." Abigail spoke.

"You can't just leave us here." Riley insisted.

"Yes, I can." Ian responded, his tone clearly telling everyone that he didn't care what happened to them. "Unless Ben tells me the next clue."

"There isn't another clue." Ben said slowly, as if that would help Ian understand.

"Ian, why don't you come back down here and we can talk through this together?" Riley said clearly trying to figure a way to get Ian back down to them.

Ian rolled his eyes and pointed his gun at Riley. "Don't speak again." He turned to Ben and Patrick, then swung his arm so the gun was pointing at Lydia. "The clue. Where's the treasure?"

"Dad…" Lydia drew the word out as she tried to inch towards her father. Ian cocked the gun and she stopped in her tracks.

"Ben?"

"Dad…." Lydia's breath caught in her throat and she felt tears flood her eyes.

"The lantern," both Patrick and Ben spoke as one.

"Dad..." Lydia interrupted; this was not the time to lie to Ian.

"The status quo has changed." Ben spoke quietly as Patrick kept talking to Ian.

"It's part of freemason teachings. In King Solomon's temple there was a winding staircase. It signified the journey that had to be made to find the light of truth. The lantern is the clue."

"And what does it mean?" Ian asked; the gun lowering. Lydia could breathe easier but she kept looking around trying to figure out a way to get out of range of the gun. Abigail caught her eye and motioned her to stay there as the blonde woman inched towards the teen.

"Boston. It's Boston." Ben told Ian. "The Old North Church in Boston, where Thomas Newton hung a lantern in the steeple, to signal Paul Revere that the British were coming. One if by land, two if by sea."

"One lantern." Patrick picked the clue up now. "Under the winding staircase of the steeple, that's where we have to look."

Ian smiled as he put the gun away. "Thank you." He started the elevator up again, as it went up, the rest of the party went forward as if Ian would come down and let them get on the elevator.

"Hey, you have to take us with you." Patrick said.

"Why? So you can escape in Boston?" Ian asked. He shrugged a single shoulder, "Besides, with you out of the picture there's less baggage to carry."

"What if we lied?"

Lydia nearly did a face-palm, that had to be the stupidest thing in the world for Patrick to say. If Ian thought that they were lying he'd shoot them all.

"Did you?" Ian pulled his gun out again.

"What if there's another clue?" Ben asked, trying to change the subject.

Ian shrugged again. "Then I'll know right where to find you." He said before turning the elevator on again. "See you, Ben."

"No! There's no other way out!" Ben called; Lydia stepped up to her Dad and looked up as Ian left.

"Come back! You're gonna need us, Ian!" Abigail shouted up the shaft.

"We're all gonna die." Riley stated as the elevator disappeared.

"It's gonna be OK." Ben stated. "Riley, Lydia, I'm sorry I yelled at you."

"It's OK, kiddo." Patrick said as both Patrick and Ben went to the back of the room and Ben started to look closely at the walls.

"OK, boys, what's going on?" Abigail asked, she followed the men back into the treasure room. "The British came by sea. It was two lanterns, not one."

"Yeah." Lydia agreed, "Even I know that. I thought you guys knew History better then I did."

"We do." Ben stated, "Ian needed another clue," He shrugged carelessly. "So we gave it to him."

"It was a fake." Riley realized. "It was a fake clue. That means... by the time Ian figures it out and comes back here, we'll still be trapped, and he'll shoot us then. Either way, we're gonna die." Riley's voice got more and more despondent as he kept speaking.

"Nobody's gonna die. There's another way out." Ben spoke.

"Where?" Lydia asked. "The stairs are broken because of Shaw."

Ben gave a knowing smile "Through the treasure room."

Patrick grabbed a torch and edged closer to Ben so that Ben could see what he was doing.

Lydia couldn't see what he was doing but she jumped slightly as there was a loud crack and the wall cracked open. Lydia sucked in a breath and stepped closer to Abigail as Ben and Patrick pushed the door open.

Ben stepped in first and the others slowly filed in after him.

It took a moment for Lydia's eyes to adjust but when they did, she eagerly looked around hoping to see the treasure, when she couldn't see anything though she got confused. Where was it?

"Looks like someone got here first." Ben said.

"I'm sorry, Ben." Abigail said.

"Dad, I'm sorry." Lydia spoke at nearly the same time as Abigail.

"It's gone." Ben spoke again, sounding despondent.

"Listen, Ben…" Patrick started.

"It may have even been gone before Charles Carroll told the story to Thomas Gates." Ben kept speaking, as if he didn't hear Patrick.

"It doesn't matter." Patrick said.

"I know." Ben agreed, "Cos you were right."

"No, I wasn't right." Patrick denied, Lydia looked at her grandfather in surprise, the older man did not admit that he was wrong easily. "This room is real, Ben. And that means the treasure is real. We're in the company of some of the most brilliant minds in history, because you found what they left behind for us to find and understood the meaning of it. You did it, Ben. For all of us. Your grandfather, and all of us. And I've never been so happy to be proven wrong."

"I just... really thought I was gonna find the treasure." Lydia had never heard her father sound so disappointed.

"OK." Patrick stated. "Then we just keep looking for it."

"I'm in." Abigail said, smiling slightly. Lydia nodded in agreement,

"Me too Dad."

"Not to be Johnny Rain Cloud here, but that's not gonna happen." Riley said, they all turned to look at him. "Because as far as I can see, we're still trapped down here."

Lydia nodded in agreement while she did want to keep looking for the treasure, they did have to get out of their current predicament.

"Now, Ben, where is this other way out?

"Well, that's it. It doesn't make any sense, because the first thing the builders would have done after getting down here was cut a secondary shaft back out for air...and in case of cave-ins." Ben walked around the room again, looking closely at the walls. Finally he stopped, staring at a particular part of the wall.

"Could it really be that simple?" Ben's voice was quiet but in the silence Lydia could hear him even all the way across the room. "The secret lies with Charlotte." He fumbled around in his jacket and brought out the pipe from the Charlotte. His body blocked Lydia's view of what he was doing.

Suddenly, the wall cracked open.

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**Please review! There's only one chapter left after this one! Also, I'm writing the sequel, Lydia Gates and the Book of Secrets should be posted soon!**


	13. Chapter 13

**Here's Chapter 13, as sad as I am to see this end I'm excited because I'm working on the sequel. It should be posted soon!**

**And am I the only one who's been hearing rumors about a third National Treasure movie?**

**Oh and I'm skipping ahead a tiny bit because I spent like 3 months trying to capture the awsomeness that is the treasure room and failed miserably each time. So I'm skipping ahead to when they are in the church again and Ben is talking to Sadusky.**

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Lydia sighed and laid her head on Abigail's shoulder. She hadn't slept much in the past few days and she was starting to fall asleep, faintly she could hear her father and the FBI agent talking about the treasure.

"You know, the Templars and the Freemasons believed that the treasure was too great for any one man to have, not even a king. That's why they went to such lengths to keep it hidden."

"That's right." Sadusky sounded impressed with Ben's knowledge.

"The Founding Fathers believed the same thing about government. I figure their solution will work for the treasure too."

_Give it to the people. _Lydia thought as Sadusky voiced her thoughts.

"Divide it amongst the Smithsonian, the Louvre, the Cairo museum..." Ben said, listing off the most famous museums Lydia could think of. "There are thousands of years of world history down there. And it belongs to the world, and everybody in it."

"You really don't understand the concept of a bargaining chip." Sadusky laughed a little.

"OK, here's what I want. Dr Chase gets off completely clean, not even a little Post-it on her service record."

"OK." Sadusky nodded as Ben kept talking.

"I want the credit for the find to go to the entire Gates family, with the assistance of Mr. Riley Poole."

"And what about you? " Sadusky asked.

"I'd really love not to go to prison." Ben stated. "I can't even begin to describe how much I would love not to go to prison."

"Someone's got to go to prison, Ben."

"If you have a helicopter I just may be able to help with that." Ben said, "Ian and his…" he trailed off trying to think of the word he needed to use.

"Minions," Lydia supplied the word before a giant yawn over took her.

"Ian and his minions will be at the old north church in Boston, I'm sure you could figure out what to charge him with."

"And what about Lydia?" Sadusky asked.

"What about her?" Ben's voice suddenly took a turn. Lydia had never heard her father sound so cold.

"Molly has a really good case to get Lydia and make sure that you never see her until she turns 18."

"I know." Ben sighed, "But really? How well I've taken care of her for the last 10 years, it means nothing? On our side, Molly left and never looked back. My lawyer can vouch that. We've sent updates to pass on to Molly's lawyer."

"I've got someone in school that can vouch for that." Lydia spoke up. "Dylan Thomas always edits the letters I write to Mom, in fact I gave him one last week, he hadn't given it back to me before we left, he should still have it."

"She went to your school, Lydia." Sadusky looked between Ben and Lydia. "After her visit she decided she wants to talk with the two of you to decide the arrangements, rather than just petition for full custody."

"If it's possible, I'd like to settle this out of court," Ben stated.

"That will be up to you and Molly, but she is searching for a new lawyer." He told them, "She's waiting in DC."

Ben nodded and looked to where Patrick, Abigail, Riley and Lydia were sitting. "So, when can we get back to DC?" he asked.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*Back in DC*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Lydia woke as the plane started to land, shaking her head to clear the sleep from it.

"Almost home," Ben said.

"Do you think she'll be at the gate waiting for us?" Lydia asked.

"I don't know, she did say she wants to meet up in a couple of days to talk."

"I may sleep until then." Lydia yawned, "I never knew that Treasure Hunting could make me so tired."

"Once we get you home you can sleep as long as you want." Ben promised.

Lydia smiled. "Thanks," she said. It took a while but they were finally let off the plane Lydia was still yawning as they got into a cab and started going home.

Lydia was so tired that she fell asleep on the drive home. She woke slightly as she felt someone pick her up. "Dad?" Lydia asked sleepily.

"I've got you, Ladybug." Ben's voice was a deep whisper.

"I know." Lydia wrapped her arms around her dad's neck and tightened her hold.

"Is she okay?" Lydia heard an unfamiliar voice ask.

"She's not injured, just tired." She could faintly hear Ben say. "I'll put her in her room and we can talk."

The next thing Lydia knew, she was waking up in her room, the sun was streaming in through the windows.

Sleepily she sat up; grabbing her cell phone she glanced at the date. Her eyes bugged out, she'd gotten home nearly 24 hours before.

"Dad?" She called out, as she walked out into the hall.

"Hi Lydia," Abigail answered instead as she exited the bathroom.

"Is Dad here?"

"Yeah, the living room," Abigail jerked her head in the direction of the room.

"Thanks." Lydia yawned again as she walked into the kitchen, glancing into the living room she had to stare for a moment before she recognized her mother. Molly happened to look up then and her eyes widened as she saw Lydia. Ben and Patrick turned and Ben smiled as he saw his daughter.

"There's French toast in the microwave for you." Ben said, "Nuke it and come in here please."

Lydia nodded. "Okay Dad." She pressed a button on the microwave and got a glass of orange juice to have with her breakfast.

When the microwave beeped she took the plate out and carried it into the living room. She smiled tensely at Molly. "Hi Mom," she greeted, unsure what to say to the woman she hadn't talked to in 10 years.

Molly tried to smile back warmly. "Hi Lydia," she greeted back.

"What do you all need to talk to me about?" She asked the group at large as she cut into her breakfast.

"Custody arrangements," Ben got right to the point.

"I thought that you had full custody." Lydia said.

"I do, I had full custody granted to me when Molly went to rehab and after she got out….." Ben trailed off.

"Maybe we should start at the beginning." Patrick offered.

"Before we start on that though, I would like to say something to you Lydia."

"Yeah?" Lydia put her plate and glass down and looked at her mother. She could faintly see a resemblance; they had the same color eyes.

"This isn't your fault Lydia; you didn't do anything to make me stay away." Lydia's eyes filled with tears as she finally heard the words she'd been longing to hear for years.

"I-" Lydia didn't know how to respond.

Molly slowly moved towards her daughter, as if trying to keep Lydia from getting spooked. "I only stayed away because I thought there was a restraining order against me."

"Why would you think that?" Lydia asked.

"My lawyer lied to me." Molly said, "We should start at the beginning though, so you understand the whole story." She paused for a moment. "Do you know why your father and I got divorced?"

"Dad said it was because you drank so much," Lydia said.

"Yes," Molly nodded, "I was an alcoholic and the only way for me to clean up was for Ben to divorce me and file for full custody. After I was in a huge car crash during the divorce, the courts ordered me to go to rehab. I haven't taken a sip of alcohol since November 30th 1995."

"I got full custody and told both my lawyer and hers that while I had full custody I wanted Molly to have access to you and I told her lawyer where we moved to and to give her the information after she got out of rehab."

Lydia looked around at the group, the hatred almost crackled in the air. "But my lawyer lied to me and said that Ben had filed a restraining order against me and that I wasn't allowed near you or Ben." Molly said darkly.

"So that's why you never found us," Lydia said, "and why you never answered any of my letters."

"Yes, that's right. I never got any of them." Molly said, she sighed heavily.

"So are we going to be going to court to decide on who has custody?" Lydia asked.

There was a pregnant pause. "We hope to decide out of court." Ben said.

"Do I have a say in this?"

"Yes." Ben and Molly spoke as one.

"You have a say in it, but we will be making the final decision." Ben spoke up.

"But no matter which parent we, as a group choose for you to live with, you will spend weekends and holidays with the other." Molly said.

Lydia nodded, "Okay." She said, "Where do you live?" She turned to Molly.

"Oregon currently, but I'll be moving here, that way no matter who you live with you can still go to the same school and you won't have to move across the country if we decide have you live with me."

"Okay." Lydia said, she sat back on the couch as the doorbell rang.

Ben got up and opened the door as Lydia took a bite of her French toast.

"Mom," Lydia turned when she heard Ben greeting his mother.

"Nana!" Lydia jumped up from her spot, plunked her breakfast down on the coffee table and hugged her grandmother.

"I came back as soon as I heard about the treasure." Emily said, wrapping Lydia in her arms. She glanced around the living room, her eyes narrowing when she saw Patrick, but like she'd done for so many years she ignored him for Ben and Lydia. When her eyes dropped onto Molly there was confusion for a split second before she realized who was sitting in the living room, when Emily realized who Molly was, her teeth gritted and she had a difficult time keeping a civil tone as she spoke.

"What is _she_ doing here?"

"We were just about to explain to Lydia." Ben stepped in and guided Emily to another chair.

"I think it would be best if Ben was the one who told everyone." Molly said quietly.

"Yes, I think so as well." Nana's tone was as cold as ice.

Lydia sat back down on the couch, grabbed her breakfast and started eating again as Ben started talking. "Molly, while I will be telling Lydia and my mother what happened, I also won't mince words when it comes to your part, or mine, either for that matter, we both acted horribly towards one another and if we hadn't, well, we wouldn't be in this situation right now."

"I understand, Ben, I don't expect you to sugar-coat it," Molly said.

Ben turned to Lydia and Emily and started speaking. "Molly was an alcoholic for about a year before I caught on; I found out when Lydia was about ready to start Kindergarten. Molly swore that she hadn't had anything to drink while she was pregnant or breastfeeding Lydia and I believed her then and I believe her still about that."

"It's true." Molly spoke up now she ignored the glare Emily was sending her. "I didn't become an alcoholic until Lydia was about 2."

"But when I found out, I was livid, what if she had driven with Lydia in the car while she was drunk?" Ben asked. "Once I knew the extent of her drinking habits, I insisted she go to rehab."

"And you told me she was going on business trips." Lydia supplied, remembering the conversation she'd had with her father a few days previously.

"We didn't want to burden you with the knowledge." Ben explained, "And rehab seemed to work for a few months but…"

"It didn't." Molly spoke up again. "From September 1994 to May 1995 I went through several rehabs, but they never worked, rehab only works when the addict wants to get clean and at that point I didn't. Ben filed for divorce and full custody, I was going to fight it but when I was in an accident that damaged a local park right before a custody hearing the judge ordered me to go to rehab if I wanted a chance of getting custody of Lydia."

"And she went." Ben picked up the story now. "And that's the last I heard from her until Sadusky brought her in after the FBI picked me up for stealing the Declaration."

"Now, I went through rehab again and this time it actually worked, because I wanted to get clean." Molly picked up the story again. "After I went through rehab I went back to the house to try and see Lydia, but the two of you had moved by then. Apparently, our lawyers had suggested that Ben and Lydia move somewhere else so that the divorce was a little cleaner and that Lydia didn't start thinking 'Daddy kicked Mommy out of this house.'"

"So I went to my lawyer who told me that Ben had filed a restraining order against me."

"I hadn't." Ben spoke up now. "While I wasn't a fan of Molly I knew that there are some things a dad can't do when it comes to little girls and I told both lawyers I wanted Molly to have access to Lydia and that I was willing to give her partial custody after she got out of rehab."

"But my lawyer lied to me." Molly repeated, "He said that Ben had filed a restraining order against me, what could I do against that? The judge that had overseen our custody case wasn't a fan of me, so I probably wouldn't have been able to get custody if I filed. And I didn't have the money to pay the bills that my lawyer would give me if I did file." Molly sighed, "But if I had filed, then I would have found out that my lawyer lied."

"Why would your lawyer lie to you?" Lydia asked, "I thought the job of a lawyer was to help his or her client, wasn't Mom his client?"

"I was paying for her lawyer," Ben said. "She was a stay at home mom who didn't have much money, and I was willing to help her out but I didn't want the money to be spent on alcohol so I paid her lawyer directly, apparently he thought that since he was being paid by me he should help me keep custody of Lydia."

"But the restraining order was fake, something I should have realized when Sadusky contacted me." Molly commented. "But I was still so filled with anger at Ben that it took Dylan to make me realize that we were all victims."

"Dylan?" both Emily and Lydia spoke as one.

"Yes, your boyfriend Dylan and I spoke when I was at your school." Molly told Lydia.

"Boyfriend?" Ben and Patrick asked as one.

"I didn't know you had a boyfriend." Emily said.

"I don't," Lydia told Nana "Dylan and I are not boyfriend-girlfriend." She told Ben and Patrick. "And we're not really even friends." She told Molly.

"Well, when I went to your school to collect your things he stopped me in the hall, he thought I was you from behind. And he gave me the letter; we spent a few minutes talking about how you'd given him the letters to edit ever since Ben started making you write the letters yourself."

Lydia nodded. "Yeah, I had horrible grammar when I was in 3rd grade, before Dylan skipped another grade he and I were in the same class. In English we had a few assignments that we had to give to other students to grade and Dylan was the only one who didn't make fun of me for my bad grammar so when Dad said he wanted me to practice good grammar by editing my letters to mom, I rebelled and gave them to Dylan to fix." Lydia shrugged "I just never stopped giving him the letters even though I'm better at grammar now."

"You gave the letters to Dylan?" Ben asked, surprised that his daughter would cheat on the assignment that he'd given to her.

"Yeah," Lydia nodded, "Why do you think I always take extra cookies to school after I give you the letter to send to the lawyer?" She shrugged again. "I gotta pay Dylan for helping me."

"Well after Dylan and I spoke, I realized that it was my lawyer who had been keeping us from each other." Molly said.

"So where does that leave all of us?" Lydia asked, looking around at her family.

"That leaves us to figure out what to do about you." Ben said.

"Like I stated earlier, I will be moving here so that you can spend weekends with the parent you don't live with."

Lydia nodded, "Can I take some time to think about which parent I would like to live with?"

"Yes." Ben and Molly spoke as one again.

Lydia nodded, "Okay."

December 1st 2004:

Abigail pulled up to Lydia's school and paused in the front. She could see the teen was surrounded by four or five other teens, all were bundled up in the cold. "And then my dad and grandpa light some of the torches and I could see the treasure." She could hear what the girl was saying after she parked and got out of the car.

"What did it look like?" One of the teenage girls asked, her voice awed.

"Incredible." Lydia told the group. "The room seemed to go on forever. I think it was twice as big as the theater here on campus."

"Lydia." Abigail spoke up, the group turned and the other teens seemed surprised to see Abigail there.

"Hey Abi." Lydia greeted.

"I'm in the car when you're ready to go."

"Did you keep anything?" One of the boys asked.

"No." Lydia shook her head. The other kids looked surprised and some looked at Lydia as if she had a few screws loose. "The treasure belongs to the world and everyone in it." Lydia repeated what Ben had said a few weeks earlier. She then turned and motioned to Abigail. "I gotta go." She said, the teens dispersed and Lydia went to the car.

"Where's Dad?" She asked.

"At the therapist's office," Abigail said, "He and your mother's session went a little long, he called and asked me to pick you up, there isn't enough time for him to come and pick you up and get back to the therapist's office before you'd be late for your session."

"Okay." Lydia slid into Abigail's car and buckled herself in.

For once, traffic was light and they were able to get to the therapist's office in record time. Lydia grabbed the spiral notebook she used to do the assignments her therapist gave her and quickly made her way into the building. Ben was sitting in the waiting room and he looked up as Lydia came in.

"Hey." He greeted, "how was school?"

"I finally got to meet with the guidance counselor and she told me that there is a way for me to test out of a few classes, but some of the classes I need to take next year." Lydia said. "I won't be able to test out of Marine Biology and French III, so I think I'll take those plus Creative Writing and European History." Lydia and Ben had come to a consensus; Lydia could test out of a few classes, as long as she took the extra non-school time in her day and spent it with either Molly or Brandon to get to know them again and form a bond with them before going off to college.

Ben smiled and placed his arm around her shoulders as she sat down. No sooner had she sat down, the family therapist come out into the waiting room.

"Let's all go into the office, I want this session to be a family one." Mary spoke.

Lydia shrugged and got up and followed Mary into the familiar office. "What do you want to talk to us about?"

"Custody arrangements, have we made a decision yet?" Mary asked as Ben and Lydia sat in the office across from Molly who had already been sitting.

"Yes." Ben said.

"We decided that Lydia will continue to live with me but once the move is final, Molly will be driving Lydia to and from school. Lydia will go over to Molly's house after school to do homework and for dinner. If she wishes to spend the night she can but unless she calls me to say she's spending the night I'll be picking her up at about 7:30 that way we can have some time together before Lydia has to go to bed."

"And what if Lydia wants to spend more time with Ben?" Mary turned to Molly.

"Then she gets it," Molly's reply was instantaneous. "I want to get to know Lydia more, but I'm not going to push her to get close to me; I know she spent about 10 years thinking I didn't love her. As much as I want to, I can't take that away in an instant. Trust is earned and I'll do anything to get Lydia to trust me again."

Ben leaned back in his chair, they had adjustments ahead of them, but Molly, as imperfect as she was, clearly wanted to be a part of Lydia's life. He couldn't fault her for that. It was important to both Lydia and Molly that they build a relationship. And like Molly he'd do anything if it meant that Lydia trusted her mother again.

* * *

**To be continued in Lydia Gates and the Book of Secrets. Coming soon to a fanfiction site near you!**


	14. Authors note

The sequel is posted! I finally got around to posting the sequel to this story, It's titled Lydia Gates and the Book of Secrets.


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